from
Roman Deininger
On a clear November day, the Bavarian Prime Minister climbed into the cockpit of a fighter jet in Manching, Upper Bavaria. His gray flight jacket was emblazoned with the Bavarian coat of arms and the pilot’s no-frills code name: “Dr. Markus Söder”. The sirens wailed in the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus in Berlin and in Armin Laschet’s row house in Aachen-Burtscheid. Okay, no sirens wailed, but it is true that Söder put his thumb up in the Eurofighter like Tom Cruise once did in “Top Gun”. The maneuver was only of limited use in refuting the widespread suspicion that the CSU boss was primarily a political actor.