The last parliamentary debates of 2023 have once again impressively demonstrated how imaginatively MPs insult each other. The history of the German Bundestag is also a history of creative mobs.
The hippopotamus consolidated its position in parliamentary parlance thanks to Angela Merkel. In April 2005, the then opposition leader from the CDU came quite suddenly to the subject of this African animal – in a Bundestag debate that was about the guidelines for Europe’s China policy. Merkel raised fundamental questions of respect and also mentioned a hippopotamus – one that was apparently not in the best of health. According to the parliamentary minutes, she recalled that the SPD politician Gernot Erler had once accused the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) in the House of acting with the “sensitivity of a hospitalized hippopotamus”.