gloss of
Thomas Balbier
In an interview with time online Bavaria’s state parliament president Ilse Aigner has just said a sentence that stimulates the imagination. In the conversation, the CSU politician was asked, among other things, about her ambitions after the state elections in 2023 and whether she could imagine a different position than the executive chair in the Maximilianeum. At first, Aigner replied as if from a handbook for political phrases: You never know what will happen next, the speaker of the parliament is a great job, the office suits her – everything is pretty much to be expected. But then she followed up with a sentence that evoked associations that developed a wild life of their own in the head. “As the mother of the country, I feel really comfortable.”
If you consider that prime ministers like Markus Söder in Germany unofficially bear the outdated title “country father”, the following picture arises in your mind’s eye: Papa Markus and Mama Ilse hug their many small Bavarian children like a big family. Without getting too intimate: But don’t Aigner and Söder really behave like an old married couple? They tease and taunt – in the said interview, Aigner accuses her husband of making mistakes in energy policy – and in the end they stay together.
If you spin the thought further, other state politicians also come into view – what role would they have at this family reunion? Hubert Aiwanger as the quirky country uncle who cracks gender jokes and slams a bratwurst on the plate of the vegan niece with the words “It’s already dead”? State grandfather Edmund Stoiber in a rocking chair, talking to himself, complaining that the nine-euro ticket is not also valid for the Transrapid? There were even two candidates for the figure of the nerdy country cousin in academic format: Minister of Science Markus Blume and Minister of Education Michael Piazolo. Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann would be set as a relaxed state brother-in-law who tells stories all evening and doesn’t even notice that his listeners have long since fallen asleep. None of this would be a problem for Green Party leader Katharina Schulze: As the youngest at the state family table, she prefers to talk to her cell phone and constantly fills her Instagram account – if she is not annoying those present with a moral sermon about factory farming and air travel.
If you have a family like that, you don’t need politicians anymore.