One of the great mysteries of our time is the intellectual capacity of top politicians. While we tend to slide into dementia as we get older – “calcified” used to be called that when everything was better – or tend to a certain narrow-mindedness, our political achievers go through an amazing development as soon as they are no longer in office. Günther Beckstein recently revealed that he often has to bite his tongue on the CSU board and that he is worried about the disposal of nuclear waste. Maybe he even thinks that after two liters of beer at the Oktoberfest you’re no longer fit to drive – you can’t take that much anymore anyway when you’re old.
Apart from that, Beckstein has always been considered exceptionally rational, which cannot be said of all his colleagues. A certain simplicity of thinking is phenotypically part of the job profile of the top Bavarian politician.
Most of the time, Christian social men are affected – simply because Bavaria still doesn’t have any real top politicians. And the CSU far too many men who have to become something. When they then become general secretary, folklore requires them to be short declarative sentences with the ability to pick toenails. They can hardly get out of the role later on. Only in old age do they regain their great form. Erwin Huber, for example, began studying philosophy at the age of 72 and graduated in 2022. Edmund Stoiber, 81, now tends towards self-mockery.
So once the threshold of old age is crossed, some people go through an amazing transformation. So is there still hope for Andi Scheuer and Alexander Dobrindt? Difficult to say, they are still much too young for that at 48 and 52, and recent statements are anything but optimistic. Markus Söder, 56, is so versatile that you trust him to do everything anyway and the opposite of that too.
One can be curious about the only non-CSU member in Bavaria’s top political league, Hubert Aiwanger, 52, from the Free Voters. He churns out sentences that whole generations of general secretaries would be ashamed of. Maybe he says to himself: I’ll be all the wiser when I’m old! It can just be that he has to be as old as the biblical Methuselah – 969 years.