Finance minister must be a wonderful job. It’s only slowly becoming clear to you now that everyone in Berlin wanted it. It used to be thought that this was the most boring position in the cabinet, that you had to look serious, be good at arithmetic and have a charisma like the famous Swabian housewife. Wolfgang Schäuble practically cultivated this impression.
That is of course completely wrong. Olaf Scholz only lost its sleepy effect when he stepped out of the classic role and used words like “boom” or “bazooka”. Suddenly he was fit for chancellor. Or would anyone still remember the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, had he not held his outstretched middle finger at the camera?
The undoubtedly famous Bavarian Franz Josef Strauss was also finance minister at one point. But he was by no means known for his skills in cameralistic bookkeeping, and the billion-dollar loan came much later.
As finance minister, Markus Söder marched through the countryside with his legs apart in donation trousers, let the cabaret artist Django Asül fall asleep at the strong beer tapping in the Hofbräuhaus, when it came to sarcastic tips against the incumbent Prime Minister, and did not avoid any other filth. This shows great leadership skills.
Söder’s successor Albert Füracker has so far not achieved anything in any of these disciplines. And? Does anyone know the man? Just.
Christian Lindner is already of a different format. At a young age he drove a software startup called Moomax up against the wall and has since complained that there is no proper culture of failure in Germany. But there are, Lindner lives from second, third, fourth chances.
Just remember how shortly before Corona he only managed to follow up on the Thuringian one-day Prime Minister and FDP colleague Thomas Kemmerich not to congratulate the election with brown votes. Hardly anyone knows today.
Everyone, on the other hand, knows his first missed opportunity in 2017 to become a minister himself. There he uttered the legendary sentence: “It is better not to govern than to govern wrongly.” Here, too, he now has a second chance again.