If you listen carefully to the Chancellor, his priorities are crystal clear: Fears first, Ukraine second. Scholz takes the path of the least imposition – and wants us to call it “leadership”.
As my “girlfriend” tells me, the summer of fashion brings a well-established newcomer: the leopard pattern. According to the magazines, this “animal print” is “a statement in itself”. You have to be very careful, warns the “girlfriend”, and at best combine the Leos “with simple basics”, which certainly also include “ruffles or puff sleeves”, but probably not fighter jets or no-fly zones, because then “the look can quickly appear overloaded “.
In war there is no escape, even in the shallows, and so this column by an unserved man has to rumble once more into the olive green. Since parts of the rest of the public have also tended to trivialize the horror in recent days (“free the Leos”, selfies in a Leo look with the security politician Sara Nanni from the Greens), it should be remembered: the Leopard 2 is, according to my rather superficial understanding, a War machine whose main task is, among other things, to shoot holes in other tanks, turning the inside of the same tracked vehicles into a horrific tornado of man and red-hot pieces of metal.
War is terrible and should scare everyone terribly. He probably does too: When I bought a pepper salami in Rewe, I heard the employees murmur when they were stocking the refrigerated section that “yes, of course” nuclear war was coming – and only cynics would point out at this point that Berlin could definitely do with a flash of light in January .
Scholz knows and respects the fear of the Germans. For him, therefore, the following applies: Fears first, Ukraine second. Basically, that’s exactly what he said in the Bundestag, albeit in his own way, which is why it went under. The Scholzomat turned his sentence before sending it, chopped it up and put it back together incorrectly. Feel free to read it three times:
“We will make decisions that are always weighed up in such a way that they can also be well represented for security reasons for Germany and Europe through their involvement in the decisions of our international partners and allies, and not with regard to their effect on Ukraine.”
Hm? Really? So we don’t decide based on their impact on Ukraine? But in terms of our security? Yes, exactly, that’s the line. Scholz’ sentence monster (read in the stenographic report) is no slip of the tongue. It’s basically a very quiet form of populism: a focus on people’s acute fears – not necessarily on what keeps an unpredictable aggressor within its borders in the long term.
The fact that Scholz’s sentences sound as if they came straight from a Leopard 2 smoke screen is strategy: when it suits him, the head of government loses the shyness of concise, clear formulations. “The traffic light is on!” is still the catchiest sentence of his chancellorship, closely followed by “yes, I could” or “I have no concrete memory of that”.
Scholz simply does not want to be understood because that is part of the new chancellor myth maintained by the SPD. The current message from the SPD is: “Be quiet, that’s too high for you”.
The leader of the parliamentary group, Rolf Mützenich, told critics in the Bundestag: “You don’t have the necessary background knowledge,” calling for “more humility.” After the tank breakthrough, every SPD party soldier spread the message with frenetic applause: Scholz is the good shepherd, to whom one should bow – after all, the cheeky scribblers and snotty red and green traffic light parliamentarians do not know in which pearls of knowledge the Chancellor bathes weekly .
Olaf Scholz himself also helps with this self-cult. As is well known, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash accused him of “Scholzing” (and for this he spread a meme by a Ukrainian friend) – that is, promise support, delay it. Scholz is now trying to turn this “Scholzing” into a Geusen word, i.e. a slur mutated into a defiant word: “The translation of Scholzing is: Germany does most of it,” he said recently on the ZDF program “What now, Mr. Scholz?”.
This protective, trusting and arrogant SPD attitude is so annoying that one hardly wants to praise the chancellor’s successful diplomatic jiu-jitsu. It’s true: Scholz “linked arms” so firmly with the Americans during his hesitation that they, for their part, had to deliver tanks – possibly nonsensical from a military point of view – and thus place themselves next to Germany in the possible beam of light of a nuclear downfall. Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk is right: “It will go down in history.”
But how does this story continue? Are the Leos now a “game changer”, ZDF asked the Chancellor. “It’s a terrible war,” Scholz didn’t answer. The frustrated journalist Bettina Schausten should have plucked the microphone from his jacket with the words “we’ll continue without you” – we wouldn’t have understood the chancellor much worse then.
However, I am afraid that Scholz would actually like that very much.
