Two wide white box armchairs, a small table in front of them, the questioner sits on the left, the interviewee on the right – Olaf Scholz. A familiar setting, actually. But the victorious candidate for chancellor is not sitting on a talk show, but in the Museum of Communication. A good place, at least when you consider that the budding traffic light coalition is currently in a week of silence. You negotiate and don’t talk.
But because Scholz is now a guest at the night of the SZ economic summit and is being interviewed by editor-in-chief Wolfgang Krach, he also has to communicate. And for the fact that Scholz has just finished a ten-hour day of negotiations, he looks surprisingly lively.
He is asked how many votes he thinks he will be elected with. Scholz looks astonished. With the majority. Do you think you will get more votes from the others? It would be fair – but it is unusual. Scholz grins. He seems like someone who is doing nothing but balancing interests. Everyone should get something and be satisfied.
A look into the hall in the Museum for Communication in Berlin.
(Photo: Friedrich Bungert / SZ)
One of the likely future partners is in the audience, co-Green leader Annalena Baerbock. The Greens have the biggest stomach ache with the traffic light, the grassroots, the young, their voters want pure climate protection and if it doesn’t work, they will lose.
Scholz should probably notice how tense the Green is watching him. And so he speaks for the compromise, a basic democratic virtue without which it would not work. This is not surprising so far, but it does mean that he adds a confession that is clear for his circumstances: “I despise people who cannot compromise. Who would want to be ruled by John Wayne”. Wayne, the western hero.
Baerbock watches attentively
That could be understood as a warning to his negotiating partners from the FDP and the Greens – if Scholz did not postpone a declaration of love to the traffic lights: “Every hour that we sit there, I get more and more the feeling that something is growing together, something is growing together fits”. Baerbock watches attentively.
Will the traffic light soon, perhaps by the end of the week, have grown together or be better built? There is a lot that is in the realm of the possible, Scholz evades. There are “very, very targeted negotiations”. He would have loved to do it with the coalition agreement like in the 1960s, writing down on three pages what one wanted to do. “But of course we do it differently”, a look at the Greens co-boss, “we certainly write many pages full”. A detailed contract is above all a concession to the Greens. In Hamburg, the party in the red-green coalition with First Mayor Scholz had occasionally felt that it had been tricked because Scholz interpreted vague formulations in the government program differently than they did.
The conversation started at 9:15 p.m. and it was 9:30 p.m. when the first topic was dealt with: the relationship between Scholz and Merkel. The fact that the outgoing Chancellor said that she could sleep peacefully when he was in the Chancellery was “a compliment” to himself and to democracy, “that one could also sleep peacefully when the others were in power”. For now, however, Scholz leaves no doubt after an hour and a thematic ride through Corona, Belarus and the formation of a cabinet, he wants to rule first. And “soon”.