Talk rounds on television dealing with the alleged new traffic light government are having a hard time at the moment. The protagonists of the talks, which are now coalition negotiations, continue to hold so tightly as one would not have expected the generally talkative caste of politicians to do. Nobody knows whether in the course of the conversation someone has snapped at one of the others, rolled their eyes in annoyance when they had to listen to things that they had always thought to be wrong. Or even popped a glass of orange juice on the table, as Friedrich Merz did during the scramble for the election of the Union parliamentary group leader.
So you have to make do with flinging the twelve-page exploratory paper like an old bone. Where has it turned out hard, in whose favor, or has it been vague, in whose detriment? The common reading is that the FDP has prevailed in its core concerns, while the other two either cut back or had to be content with soft formulations. For example, with the fact that the coal phase-out could “ideally” come earlier.
Anne Will, of course, does not miss the opportunity to pester the presumed new Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his presumed Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck with this question. Both respond to this in quite different ways. Habeck is visibly touched when Will’s question as to why Lindner’s Porsche was not stopped with a speed limit and says that “this little game annoys him terribly”.
Olaf Scholz, on the other hand, replied to the question of how much he was annoyed by the talk of the FDP’s victory: “Not at all”. Scholz has a kind of natural advantage in such situations. Not only does he have his facial muscles under control, he can also turn on the Scholzomat without any problems. So Scholz repeats what he said on the marketplaces during the election campaign and that much of it can also be found in the exploratory paper.
However, Will does not give up, to which the other guests also contribute. The economist Claudia Kemfert is disappointed with the decisions on climate protection, whereupon Habeck waved his hands defensively and the FAZ-Journalist Rainer Hank, a neoliberal hardliner, himself for FAZConditions, notes with amusement, there is “almost nothing” in the exploratory paper about an expansion of the welfare state, in contrast to previous governments in which the SPD was involved. At this point, Scholz shows his famous mocking smile, which CSU boss Markus Söder once described as smurfy. But it won’t stay that way, as it becomes clear a little later.
To warm up, so to speak, Scholz switched off the Scholzomat and replied to Will’s question as to how FDP boss Lindner had managed to deal with the SPD and the Greens without any particular sharpness in tone, it was “okay that you are pursuing your obsession here”. But then Scholz suddenly goes on the offensive. In a sense, he lets the future chancellor flash and one suspects at that moment that the Scholz sentence, whoever orders a tour from him, will also get it, will be felt by many in the next four years.
Scholz uses Hank’s attack that climate protection can only be solved internationally and, as he puts it, “regional-national-provincial constriction” would not lead to a counterattack and stop it FAZ-Mann an energetic college on how important it would be for global climate protection if Germany developed climate-neutral technologies that could then also be used by other countries.
The political scientist Ursula Münch reserves the right to let the air out of the hype sparked by Anne Will about the alleged FDP victory. So far there has only been an exploratory paper; one cannot pretend that the negotiations have already been concluded. Habeck takes up this idea at the end of the program and asserts that the departments and their possible layouts have not yet been discussed at all, nor about who should become finance minister.
Scholz does not intervene at all in the discussion that develops from it, but is now sitting there again with his stoic Scholz expression. He is considered a shrewd and tough negotiator, why should he enter this delicate field in a panel discussion?
Peter Fahrenholz hopes that talk shows don’t always invite the same guests. Because political discussions need exciting arguments instead of well-known points of view.