if you want to call Olaf Scholz’s grin “smurfy”, as CSU comics connoisseur Markus Söder did a year ago, then “Schlumpfhausen” was a long way away from “Anne Will” yesterday.
After unflattering portraits, the Chancellor was motivated in the ARD individual talk to present himself as a solid, competent, and compassionate caretaker in the worst crisis.
This was followed by a 60-minute fight against the “Scholzomat” and the image of the “political hedgehog” (“Spiegel”). The chancellor’s hand swished up and down, even feelings became an issue: how he looked at the faces of the young soldiers during his last visit to Moscow and thought of their possible death.
And Scholz warned that with Vladimir Putin there was a neighbor who wanted to use force to move borders and that shouldn’t be the case. “Don’t you dare!” he warned Russia against attacking a NATO state.
So this chancellor was actually anything but shy, admitted to mistakes in the old energy policy and assured when things got too critical: “We will do what is possible.”
Scholz was also briefly questioned about the Saarland state elections. He could have simply said “Thank you, Anke”, because it was the previous Vice Prime Minister Anke Rehlinger who achieved a remarkable success with more than 43.5 percent (plus 14 percent).
It is about the return to a political stratosphere that the SPD only knew in Schwerin thanks to Manuela Schwesig. Scholz spoke of a “good thing” and emphasized that the SPD was a “closed party” and that the party of the election winner helped as much as Rehlinger did the SPD.
Scholz’s coalition partners in Berlin, the Greens and the FDP, narrowly missed the five percent hurdle. The Greens were only missing 23 votes. You will ask what was probably more decisive for this: the previous inner turmoil of the party in the Saar or the lack of a profile as a climate protector in the federal government. The FDP also suffered a setback. The political feelings of spring are distributed strikingly unequally.
Such election evenings are mandatory dates for political alpha animals. At the Yesterday, Sunday after the Saarland elections, there was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to hear from CDU leader Friedrich Merz. He had gone into hiding, perhaps in the “Yellow Submarine” left behind by the Beatles.
The acoustic accompaniment of their own election Waterloo was left entirely to the newly substituted General Secretary Mario Czaja, who could not be saved even by the most popular Union phrase of the evening: “We win together, we lose together”.
After almost 23 years, the CDU on the Saar no longer provides the prime minister. Your last copy in a long line, Tobias Hans, will resign today as state chairman – if he was serious about the “personal consequences”.
With an erratic mood policy à la Söder, the loser in the election confused the Saarlanders, who were not at all keen on such antics, so that they let the Hansians test the hardness of the opposition bank with a good 28.5 percent (twelve percent minus).
Incidentally, voters in Saarland followed former SPD rock star Oskar Lafontaine one last time. Many fans were happy to follow the advice of the politician, who left the left shortly before the election date, not to vote for his wife Sahra Wagenknecht’s (yet?) party this time.
The left, in the Saar for a long time in double digits, rushes off with 2.5 percent. Recently there were two left-wing factions in the state parliament, people no longer trusted the party, says co-head Janine Wissler. And, of course, Lafontaine’s Motz exit did damage: “Of course that was a hard blow for the left in Saarland.”
Those who stayed behind can only hope that Gustav Stresemann was right: “It is easy to learn from defeats. It is more difficult to learn from victories.”
When we talk about the car market of the future – with robot cars, electric motors, Internet cockpits – the top corporations in other sectors increasingly come to the fore. Suddenly, what is thought in the VW skyscraper or in the four-cylinder BMW house is less important for the business than what the ideas of the digital groups, battery cell manufacturers and chip groups turn out to be.
Our cover story deals with the chip attacks by Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm on the local car business. Total sales of autochips will triple to $160 billion by 2030, McKinsey calculates. Unlike the revolutionaries from Tesla, who design their own chips, the German car manufacturers are dependent on “good speaking terms” with the semiconductor kings. You need their goodwill like the chip needs silicon.
In any case, Danny Shapiro, head of the car division of Nvidia, one of the ten most valuable companies in the world, burst with self-confidence to my colleagues: “Every single Jaguar, every single Mercedes will be equipped with our chips. This changes the dynamics of the automobile. It is now an upgradeable machine.”
One can also interpret Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine in such a way that as much land as possible in the east, on the Sea of Azov and on the Black Sea should fall permanently to Vladimir Putin’s troops as quickly as possible. “In fact, this is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine,” says Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence. He announces an imminent guerrilla war in the eastern territories occupied by Russia.
These include the self-proclaimed “People’s Republic” of Luhansk, which plans to soon hold a referendum on joining Russia. Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Russia recognized the “People’s Republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelenskiy gave an interview to some independent Russian journalists – but they are not allowed to publish it under threat of punishment.
And then there’s the letter “Z,” which is more political than many think. In modern Greek it is derived from “Zi” (“He lives”) – and was the title of a 1969 political thriller by Constantin Gavras, which brought the evil legal perversions of a military dictatorship to the cinemas. That’s not why “Z” is seen on many Russian tanks in the Ukraine War.
In the alphabet of Russian war propaganda, the character points to the slogan “For Victory” (“Za Pobedu”). The “Z” sticks to many cars in Russia, and celebrities add the “Z” to their names on social networks.
All of this is of course toxic for a traditional Swiss insurance group – and so Zurich has decided to use its own company logo “Z” significantly less in the future. “We are temporarily removing use of the letter Z from social channels where it appears isolated and could be misunderstood,” the statement said.
With this in mind, I wish you a wonderful start to the week.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs