Election campaigns sometimes help us gain insight. The American election campaign is a particularly astonishing example of this. The Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz caused a furore by saying that Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance were “plain weird”. It was a The Emperor Without Clothes moment: That’s true, the Emperor is naked, and finally someone is saying it!
The question inevitably arises: do we have such types in Bavaria who are “plain weird”? Yes, of course we do! But apart from our Hubert: aren’t there enough others to whom the Bavarian version of “weird” applies, namely the rhetorical question: “Is Beppi crazy?” with the superlative form: “Hat’s an Wasti?”?
Gloria springs to mind quite spontaneously, the so-called Princess of Regensburg, who has successfully cultivated her particular kind of strangeness for decades. And all without democratic elections. The former district administrator Gabriele Pauli came relatively close to Gloria, but has disappeared into obscurity. Otherwise, it is mainly CSU general secretaries whose core competence, by virtue of their office, includes wild theories that seem strange.
Andi “The toll is safe” Scheuer, for example, or Alexander “Mosque in the front yard” Dobrindt. The latter, incidentally, despite being at an advanced stage of weirdness, has held top positions in politics for an astonishingly long time. Power in itself seems to encourage people to go off their minds. Which is why the Bavarian Greens and the SPD also occasionally go off on a tangent, but nobody in this country finds that strange because they simply have too little power.
How could it be otherwise in a federal state where the prime ministers are already making a name for themselves with bold theses? For example, the so-called Transrapid uncertainty principle (Stoiber) or the legendary two-measure axiom (Beckstein). Markus Söder is still lacking something similarly groundbreaking, even though he regularly provides finger exercises in the bizarre. Be it with his cross decree or by posting fairly regularly photos of his lunch on Instagram like a completely normal food tyke. He is only just getting started, so to speak. He will surely manage to make the big leap one day.