It’s summer and the election campaign in Bavaria, and at times like this, the legacies in public space traditionally increase significantly. At the Erdinger Volksfestplatz, for example, Markus Söder and Hubert Aiwanger performed at the “Stop the heating ideology” demonstration, left a few obvious untruths (“compulsive gendering”, “bringing back democracy”) and then went home without cleaning up. You only know that from children in the play corner: create chaos and then quickly get away.
The otherwise beautiful old town of Regensburg often looks like a devastated play corner. After every weekend, every district festival, oh well, after every reasonably mild evening, the trash cans in the city overflow, pizza boxes pile up in doorways, disposable coffee cups roll over the cobblestones. Garbage everywhere you look. Almost ubiquitous.
Regensburg’s third mayor Ludwig Artinger therefore thinks in the Central Bavarian newspaper loudly considering levying a packaging tax based on the Tübingen model. If you sell food and drinks there in disposable packaging, you have to pay extra: 50 cents per coffee mug or French fries bowl, 20 cents for an ice cream spoon. That will wear off at some point. And not just for restaurateurs, who could pass the surcharges on to the paying customers. So everyone would do well to avoid all the rubbish from the outset, a kind of hygiene incentive.
And so back to the legacy causes Söder and Aiwanger. The Tübingen model would not only do well in Regensburg, but also at the public festivals in the Free State, especially if politicians make them happy. There’s so much verbal legacies lying around that need to be taken care of. So: For every half-truth, a Hunni into the municipal piggy bank. Lies cost 500 euros and whoever drags the free democratic basic order into the dirt has to pay an oil tank full for a single-family house. Or resign. It would be best for the municipalities to collect a flat-rate cleaning fee from certain overly mission-conscious candidates in this election campaign.
Incidentally, the author of this text is consistently referred to as “the employee” in her employment contract. Bad, this gender madness, especially in this media. Almost omnipresent like the rubbish in the streets of Regensburg after a mild summer weekend.