None that he “doesn’t let himself be fooled” by interviews and public calls, said the Chancellor in his one-on-one session with Maybrit Illner. The stoic program can hardly be formulated more concisely than this: don’t let yourself be fooled, don’t get excited and agitated, no matter what happens. If you want to understand why Olaf Scholz lets everything drip off in the communicative situation and therefore also with Illner, you have to let the vocabulary “Kirre” linger on for a moment. The question is: How does the chancellor experience himself when communicating? He gave insights into this at Illner under the heading “War, crises, coalition – how well does the chancellor lead?”
Scholz sees public communication as a therapeutic process. He experiences objections, criticism or just questions as a threat to mental hygiene. As a result, communication is a defensive concept for him. Attempts to open new barrels must be fended off. We must fend off contexts that only lead to complications. The need for maximum exposure is to be warded off. Rather, in a legal manner, it is about a communicative minimalism that only moves on secure ground, ignores everything else and does not offer the opponent (i.e. potentially all listeners and viewers, but certainly the presenter) no flanks through chatter. As a distraction, Scholz says: “There’s not that much talk. This is my third time on your show. That’s a lot more than you’ve heard from previous chancellors.”
Just don’t get discouraged
But little can be said with so many words. Being tight-lipped isn’t against talk show etiquette, and no one can be held on there for to-the-point answers. Scholz takes full advantage of this fact to keep irritation at bay. Press conferences – the chancellor repeatedly uses them as a stimulus word for Illner – prevent exactly that: staying true to oneself. According to Scholz, press conferences are like interviews and public calls, but also like talk shows, potential ways to get crazy.
It is therefore better to brush off the conjured zeitgeist values of the authentic and spontaneous in such infrastructures. Any communicative search movement should also be forbidden. It is crucial to gather your seven senses in order not to be thrown off course. When in doubt, answer just off the point if the matter contains potential for disruption – this moment of internally directed communication is part of the structural change that the public at Scholz has to go through. The dictum of the Scholzomat refers to a mental apparatus that runs clean internally.
It’s better to unwind mantras than to appear crazy
Outwardly, this means: just don’t let yourself be provoked. And just don’t jump over sticks that are held out to you. Obscurity can be helpful in this regard. Question: Why did President Zelenskyj only recently publicly regret that he always had to put pressure on Scholz? Incidentally, Scholz replies, “our conversations are always very friendly, so I can’t really report what the pressure is supposed to be.” Better to reel off mantra after mantra (“my actions are well coordinated, well considered”) than to appear crazy.