Capital correspondents prefer to meet Olaf Scholz on the plane. – Your SZ

It’s 2:15 a.m. when the Chancellor finally goes to bed. To get there, he has to travel a short distance on the train. It leads from the French President’s salon to his own, and thus inevitably past the compartment of the chancellor’s correspondent who is traveling with him. So the next morning there is no need to ask the speaker how long Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and the Italian Mario Draghi sat together over wine on their historic journey through Ukraine, which had been invaded by Russia, to Kyiv. The means of transport is owed to a terrible war, but from a journalistic point of view it offers untold advantages.

Reporting from the centers of power depends on getting as close as possible to the actors involved. In Washington, right next to the cramped “Press Briefing Room,” where the presidential spokeswoman holds the daily press briefings, is a room with tiny workspaces for journalists accredited to the White House. Those who are allowed through do not walk many steps past the cabinet room to the Oval Office. The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, has the right to feel he is being watched. And it should.

In the Chancellery, the oversized washing machine in Berlin-Mitte, journalists are normally only admitted if a press conference is scheduled or if they have an appointment. After that, it will be appreciated if they leave the Chancellery quickly. They usually write their texts at a reasonable distance. Journalists need to be close enough to report from their own perspective, but also far enough away to maintain their independence. For which, however, there is no exact measure either in Washington or in Berlin.

Take off together

A smug Whatsapp message recently popped up on the correspondent’s cell phone. “How was it without a mask on the plane to Toronto?” Was the text. The sender was a delighted member of the Bundestag for the AfD. Previously, photos and television recordings were from the Konrad Adenauer of the readiness to fly has been disseminated en masse in the social networks. On display: Economics Minister Robert Habeck and numerous journalists on the way to Canada with Olaf Scholz. Consistently without a mask. The tenor on Twitter was: government officials and reporters took off together again.

Nowhere, apart from the special case of the train journey, do Chancellor correspondents get as close to the object of their reporting as on long-distance flights. The job cannot be done without them. For this reason, a few seats on the government plane have been reserved for the editors. For a fee – and since the beginning of the pandemic, as for all other passengers, after a negative PCR test. In the meantime, the mask requirement has therefore been lifted (which led to the objectionable recordings). These trips offer the opportunity to follow the Chancellor to the Kremlin or to the White House. In one crucial respect, however, the flights themselves are the destination.

Angela Merkel regularly received journalists traveling with her in a small meeting room in the front part of the government aircraft. The room was usually too small, which led to considerable crowding on the benches and, as a result, to the chancellor being in direct contact with the person sitting next to her. Otherwise there were really only two fixed rules for the talks. First: On the outward flight it’s about the journey, on the return flight it’s also about domestic politics. Second: everything “under three”. This means that nothing that has been said may be quoted. For example, Merkel was able to speak freely about Donald Trump without risking the USA leaving NATO immediately.

Faded jeans and baggy sweater

The rule stayed. Olaf Scholz also only speaks “under three” on board. However, he prefers to visit the journalists in the back of the plane. When he wore a baggy, gray sweater and faded blue jeans on the flight to Washington in February, this initially led to detailed considerations of minimum fashionable standards for chancellors on business trips and then to Scholz continuing the background talks without a jacket and tie, but in all Rule completed in a white shirt.

In the early phase of Scholz’s term in office, a reporter asked desperately whether the chancellor was actually speaking so quietly on purpose. With a moderate breach of the under-three rule, it can be revealed that Olaf Scholz did not give a satisfactory answer. However, before the Chancellor’s appearance, employees of the Federal Press Office set up the “karaoke system” (Scholz). It consists of two loudspeakers and two microphones, one for Scholz and one for the questioning reporter.

Back then, on the trip to Washington, the war was already casting its shadow. Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden were asked during the White House press conference whether the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline can go online while Russia deploys its troops on the borders with Ukraine. “If Russia crosses the border into Ukraine with tanks and troops, for example, Nord Stream 2 will no longer exist,” Biden said. Scholz only said: “We have prepared intensively so that we can take the necessary sanctions in concrete terms if there is military aggression against Ukraine.”

“Yes I could.”

Olaf Scholz used to be feared for his short answers. He can still do that today. When he was asked at the G7 summit in Elmau by a Deutsche Welle journalist from Poland if he could say more about the planned security guarantees for Ukraine, Scholz said: “Yes, I could.” He let the pause inserted by his speaker pass by without making use of it. Olaf Scholz can be very stubborn. In the meantime, however, this is more likely to be expressed in long answers. Scholz is a master of eternal repetition. Unlike Angela Merkel, he doesn’t believe in making himself scarce.

Scholz gives interviews at comparatively short intervals and also appears in front of the cameras. No one can seriously count how often he explained in detail how “early” the federal government had “carefully prepared” for the Russian gas supply freeze. Scholz believes that certain things cannot be said often enough and at least as many are better left unsaid. For a time he waged a silent battle with the media over the term “heavy weapons.” Germany is now supplying weapons that Scholz likes to say how heavy they are.

Perhaps even more than in the past, reporting on the chancellor in the days of Olaf Scholz was also about interpreting the chancellor. In any case, at flight altitude, when the karaoke system is running, it’s quite often about why Scholz doesn’t say what he doesn’t say and why he says what he says the way he says it. The chancellor then gets quite animated and occasionally he also says what he thinks of the whole interpreting. “Under three”, of course.