it was one of those election Sundays, at the end of which you think for a long time: What does that mean, especially in these times of multiple crises? It is quite obvious that the working atmosphere in the federal government is becoming even more tense and that mediators should perhaps submit their unsolicited applications. Seriously, there are five lessons to be learned from the state elections in Lower Saxony.
First, voters trust political figures more than political parties. We already experienced that in the last state elections (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein, NRW). In the era of uncertainty and who-knows-what-is-coming, reliability is the new gold standard of politics. Anyone who does their job well capitalizes on the office bonus, like the social democrat Stephan Weil in Hanover.
Second: Because victory is Scholz’ defeat. If you look closely, the Lower Saxony election is also a declaration of doubt about the power of the traffic light coalition. The Greens won and became junior partners in a red-green coalition, but after Robert Habeck’s blunders they performed weaker than the polls had suggested for a long time. The SPD also lost a few percentage points and the FDP even built a total loss.
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It is hard to believe that she falls out of the state parliament with 4.7 percent, although Christian Lindner is the federal finance minister. Now the liberals are addressing the big “foreigners” in the federal government (narrative: alone among leftists), when what irritates people most is that liberals and greens do not clarify their natural differences internally, but in public PR skirmishes. Both would do well not to let the traffic light flicker any longer. The FDP frustration becomes the chancellor’s question.
Third: For the CDU, the end of government participation in Hanover and the sudden drop in votes (worst result in more than six decades) is a fiasco. While the party friends in Kiel and Düsseldorf did well by largely forgoing election campaign help from Berlin, party leader Friedrich Merz was present in Lower Saxony in his search for chancellorship. With his botched campaign to accuse refugees from Ukraine and other countries of “social tourism,” he did so little to lead candidate Bernd Althusmann that he announced his resignation as head of state on election night in this dark hour.
Fourth: The model of the “grand coalition”, an emergency construction after 2005, ends up on the political dump. They no longer exist in the federal states, nor in the federal government. Nobody will miss her. Because the two people’s parties have not caused a major breakthrough anywhere in the association.
Fifth: The uncanny winner of the Lower Saxony state elections is the AfD, which should please their identification figure Vladimir Putin as well as certain destabilizing attacks on European and German infrastructure. The far-right party benefits from collateral damage from Kremlin aggression. The news from Cottbus on Sunday that SPD candidate Tobias Schick won the mayoral election there with almost 69 percent against AfD rival Lars Schieske was positive in this area of confusion.
(Photo: IMAGO/Political Moments)
Many in Germany have booked Jan Böhmermann in the comedy nonsense corner of ZDF, in that satirical TV depiction of German realities late on Friday evenings, when the approaching weekend allows fun corners. But increasingly, Böhmermann’s “ZDF Magazin Royale” is something like Wallraff for young people. Last Friday linked it Arne Schönbohm, 53, President of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), with a dubious association that is said to have contact with Russian secret services and whose founding president Schönbohm appeared in 2016: the “Cyber-Sicherheitsrat Deutschland eV”.
According to the royal research, the previous head of office (Böhmermann: “Cyberclown”) gave a speech at a club event a month ago, while he banned employees from attending club events. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) apparently wants to send the son of the former Brandenburg Interior Minister Jörg Schönbohm (CDU) to Orcus. It is said that it is being examined how a quick change of president can be achieved. A Faeser-Schönbohm press conference on Thursday has been cancelled. The Russian software provider Protelion (formerly Infotecs) is said to have advertised its potentially dangerous product as a member of the German Cyber Security Council.
Austria saves itself a second ballot and confirms Alexander Van der Bellen, who appears as an independent candidate, at the first attempt, 78, with almost 55 percent as Federal President. Walter Rosenkranz from the right-wing populist FPÖ got a good 19 percent. The other five competitors – another right-wing populist, a shoe retailer, a rock musician, a lawyer, a press columnist – each remained under ten percent. In 2016, Van der Bellen (formerly with the Greens) had to go to the runoff. “Let’s tackle it together,” he conveyed on Sunday evening as a message, the upcoming major tasks required a solidarity.
(Photo: IMAGO/SEPA.Media)
In his first six years, the re-elected president had experienced the “Ibiza affair”, a change of coalition and dozens of ministerial departures. Incidentally, he achieved his best result in cosmopolitan Vienna, his worst in the former Jörg-Haider-Land Carinthia.
Even if it’s a bit nasty, the playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931 to 1989) comes to mind at this moment: “The mentality of the Austrians is like a punch donut: red on the outside, brown on the inside and always a little drunk.”
And then there is the lawn heating, the warming measure intended to prevent frozen ground and injuries to footballers. These are expensive innovations in a sport that didn’t need them in the past – but this is becoming a problem at a time when people naturally ask at parties how they keep the heat in the living room. The German Football Association (DFB) and the German Football League (DFL) have so far behaved as if there were no energy crisis.
For weeks, the regional league team SV Babelsberg 03 has become an activist with so much strategic silence and is calling on the DFB and DFL to immediately switch off all undersoil heating in the stadiums. The energy consumption of one arena could supply 200 two-person households with energy per year. A petition has been signed by 40,000 people. The Nuremberg city council also wants the second division club 1. FC Nürnberg to limit the undersoil heating in the evenings. Saturday night games would be impossible like that.
“A renunciation of work may be as meritorious as the work itself,” we learn from Michel de Montaigne.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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