After twenty minutes, Robert Habeck threatened to turn into some kind of financial advisor. The word trust came up for the umpteenth time, he wanted to build it up, regain it, saw it as a reserve currency, and he was also ready to take on responsibility – and never forgot the hint that communication had not gone so well lately with the Greens. His responsibility was so heavy that the next logical step could only be to sell an ETF or some crypto currency at a dumping price.
Admittedly, the co-chairman of the Greens did not have an easy job with Markus Lanz. He had to represent his colleague and candidate for Chancellor Annalena Baerbock, who wrote a very controversial book. Sentences and entire passages in it were taken almost word for word from interviews and articles by other authors. Without indicating that. Baerbock was showered with criticism, indignation and malice, which were partly justified. But the drama of the last two weeks wasn’t just about these alleged plagiarism, but the communication of the Greens about it. The obviously copied passages were played down, downplayed, and even completely denied. The strategy of the otherwise so smart and harmonious and constructive Greens suddenly seemed to be to throw smoke candles around and dig deeper and deeper into the trenches. Her credibility suddenly seemed to be gone.
And now there was an astonishingly tanned and relaxed Robert Habeck next to Markus Lanz and had to do what his party colleague Oliver Krischer had failed to do in the same place last week: explain the mess around the stolen bookstores.
And Markus Lanz did what he can best: he poked at this book and the communication of the Greens as much as possible. For example, he used to answer questions to Habeck in interviews with colleagues, but gave almost demonstrative sources when he came out of the Time, from the South German or off Brigitte TV quoted.
And after a few minutes a medium miracle occurred: Habeck suddenly stopped trying to play financial advisor, but parried Lanz’s teasing so successfully that it was not the guest but the host who began to slide around in his chair. Habeck simply admitted obvious mistakes and thereby reduced the attack surface – and sometimes shrugged his shoulders when he could no longer explain the disastrous communication between the Greens. That looked believable.
The fact that Baerbock had copied from another report about a trip to the Yazidis for a report about a trip to the Yazidis was “not cool”. When asked whether he would recommend Annalena Baerbock to resign, he found the question wrong. Lanz suddenly stopped stabbing this Habeck. He unpacked his German studies, described popular scientific literature not just as a “strange genre”, but as a “black mold” and ran into top form by speaking of the laudable commandment “not to tell people any shit”. It must have been sheer desperation when Lanz let his guest rave about his successful policy as environment minister in this Schleswig-Holstein, where one apparently tans so nicely, and at the end also attested to him that he – “very solid political work ” have made. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for the Greens to get out of the trenches and back into a discussion about content.