Communicating politics with the power of the soap opera has a certain tradition in Bavaria: Unforgotten the appearance of Markus Söder on “Dahoam is dahoam”forever burned into the synapses the moment when Ilse Aigner for an internet video of her house being chased through parliament by an alleged cleaning lady will. Viewed in this way, it fits the clip that Judith Gerlach (CSU) shared with the online world on Fridayentered a prominent ancestral gallery.
In a tavern ambience, the digital minister appears as herself and cabaret artist Wolfgang Krebs as economics minister Hubert Aiwanger (FW) – who is struggling with the fax machine “to fax Markus something to the state chancellery”. A process that is inappropriate in these modern times, which is why Gerlach asks her cabinet mates to “quit the babble,” after all the entire state administration is now being digitized.
Whereupon Aiwanger not only certifies that she speaks a Hessian dialect, but also that she is constantly bored with this digital stuff. Whereupon Gerlach, in Aiwangerian style, begins to rave about the possibilities of digital administration and the simplifications for people, “from O like on registration to the upper secondary school to Z like second home tax”. Even Aiwanger is happy about that: “An Opfelsoft on top of that.”
Tongue-in-cheek self-criticism in view of the country’s digital non-state? Or peasant fart at the expense of a cabinet colleague? At least the first Twitter comments didn’t seem to agree. Maybe you just understand the whole thing as a contribution to April 1st.