M. Beisenherz: Sorry, I’m here privately
The dilemma of the traffic light government: love triangles rarely work
Robert Habeck (Alliance 90/The Greens), Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Christian Lindner (FDP) at a press event in the Federal Chancellery
© Kay Nietfeld / DPA
The traffic light: broken. AI and AfD: on the rise. And our students can no longer count. Our columnist looks back on 2023 with disillusionment.
By Micky Beisenherz
That now sounds more scolding than it was planned, and by the end of the year at the latest it should be clear to us: Apart from comic-language double whammy, nothing would come out of the Chancellor this year that could emotionalize the people’s soul. However, his sentence “We finally have to deport people on a large scale” stuck and showed that right-wing declarations of intent no longer even require right-wing parties.
This country, it seems, is under pressure like never before. And yet we are among the lucky ones: Ask in Afghanistan, Armenia, Iran, Ukraine or Israel, where Hamas set new standards for barbarism and terror on October 7th.
Not even the Pope can help us anymore. Benedetto is underground, and his successor only makes a name for himself when he haunts the internet as a fake ciscus in a spectacular white down jacket made of pure AI. No, there was no getting around artificial intelligence this year. No television show, no podcast, no newspaper took the opportunity to present a presentation or a poem that was written exclusively by a computer. Soon every joke was just annoying, and there was a fear that the joke would next lead us directly to nuclear annihilation. Almost a bit like Trump. But it won’t be back until next year.
Someone should say again that, in addition to warlike conflagration and climate catastrophe, humanity is not in a position to avoid creating another threat to its existence. Class!
There is a huge clamor for new elections
Relying on artificial intelligence is understandable from a German perspective. Thanks to the Pisa study, we now know that German students are statistically more likely to jam a pen up their nose than to solve a binomial formula. But who would blame them for not being able to handle numbers: Scholz? Lindner? Habeck? Anyone who has tried it knows that love triangles rarely work. However, it has rarely been seen so publicly. Habeck now seems so exhausted that no one would blame him if he took his muesli with Mariacron instead of water. In terms of popularity, Scholz is whizzing past the vegan bratwurst on his way down. And Lindner is doing a great job as opposition leader, he just forgot that he is part of the government.
Meanwhile, the AfD is grinning because this year it will finally have the first mayor, the first district administrator and next year the first right-wing extremist prime minister. Well, we all managed that well. And not even Germany’s greatest orthopedist, knee palpator Thommy Gottschalk, wants to distract us from our sadness any longer.
The clamor for new elections is great and usually only comes to a halt with a startled chuckle when someone presents a photo of Friedrich Merz with the words “This could be your new chancellor.”
And so in the end we look at the year 2023 almost a little in love, knowing that by mid-2024 it will already seem like the good old days. Ugh.