During major soccer tournaments, people sometimes tend to forget that there is a world event outside of the stadiums. This world happening simply always exists and the only question is whether you will find out about it and how close you will let it get to you. Against this background, Markus Lanz delivers a good hour of smartly composed entertainment television late on Thursday.
The idea of this program is, on the first evening after the group phase, with full awareness, to drive a maximally serious counter-program to the Hacke-Spitze-2: 2 from the previous day. The program starts with a long one-on-one conversation between Lanz and Neven Subotić. Subotić became known because he plays football well – the viewers of Lanz can once again get to know him differently and much better than a cautious, differentiated, empathetic person who is permanently involved in Ethiopia and who is recognizably worried about this country because of someone who is there quickly aggravating and militarily literally fueled humanitarian catastrophe.
At the end of the program, there is a long one-on-one conversation with Fabio de Masi from the Left Party, who tries in a decent manner and more than just decently dressed to outline the still opaque situation of things in the cum-ex scandals. As a member of the Bundestag, De Masi knows that really important political processes are usually complex and can therefore hardly be conveyed on entertainment television. And unlike quite a few professional colleagues, he has the talent to reduce such complexity without zeal in such a way that one understands the extent better as a political passerby. If, as an example, 30 billion euros in tax damage arise in a morally questionable trickery by the privileged and there are 30,000 schools in Germany, then you can form a quotient for the people: 1 million euros per school.
Finally, between Ethiopia and Cum-Ex, Markus Lanz didn’t put in a good mood buffer, but Alexander Gauland. The co-chairman of the AfD parliamentary group has been assigned as guardian and corrective Ann-Kathrin Müller, editor of the mirror. This arrangement had only recently proven itself when Alice Weidel was a guest – again on Thursday it would not have been necessary.
In direct comparison to the suffering in Ethiopia such as the enormous cum-ex damage to the common good, the usual little television game between Gauland on the one hand and moderation / guests on the other seems even smaller. The AfD has a new and fresh scandal on its heels, the conflict theater on television remains the old one: reproach, counter-reproach, justification, belittling, and so on and so forth. Gauland claims to have known little or nothing about everything, some things he has probably heard badly now.
Gauland is only really clear in his position on the specific nonsense that AfD member Uwe Junge had recently told (keyword “fagot bandage”). Gauland on this: “There are people in all parties who sometimes talk stupid stuff. That’s stupid stuff”. And with that back to sport.
Cornelius Pollmer.