Ask your chancellor about risks and policy competence

Ja, the times, they have changed. What did the former Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder have to listen to just because he now and then tended to make hard, probably lonely decisions; he was the Basta chancellor, that stuck to him and was not meant in a friendly way. But it was a different era, before the great turning point of February 24th, when those who refused to engage in ongoing discourse and spoke a kind of power word were still scandalized. Now that a cold wind is blowing through the country and the Bundestag, since the big questions of life and death and war and peace are at stake, those who make a decision can count on understanding.

And so Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz can be pleased that he received unanimous praise on the ARD talk show “Maischberger” on Wednesday evening for the use of his directive competence, which he had resorted to in a sticky situation on Monday regarding nuclear energy. Nasty from Sandra Maischberger for picking out an old quote from Franz Müntefering, according to which a government in which the chancellor can only assert himself with the aforementioned authority to set guidelines is about to end, but not nasty enough to unsettle the invited group. Both “Welt” editor Stefan Aust and “taz” journalist Ulrike Herrmann saw Scholz’s actions as a sign of strength, and political scientist Jessica Berlin was only slightly behind in her assessment that it was reasonable at least.

Aust, the old fox, had even known beforehand that the Chancellor would act like that! Of course you can only take your hat off to that. Herrmann, on the other hand, did not boast of her forecasting skills in retrospect, but looked straight ahead and recognized the decision as a rather daring “leadership style with a future” (one would have liked to have heard a comment from Müntefering on this) and then even said that the chancellor led like his Predecessor “from behind”, which was meant as a compliment. Although: Does a praiseworthy comparison with Angela Merkel still count, since her Russia policy has fallen into disrepute?

What Lindner has to say about the competence to set guidelines

Unfortunately, that was not discussed on Tuesday evening – oh, these talk shows, questions always remain unanswered. Christian Lindner could certainly have said a clever sentence about this, since he is a master of the art of formulation. But the FDP chairman and federal finance minister had enough to do with showing himself to be just as convinced of the chancellor’s word of power as the journalists and the political scientist and dispelling any impression that he was actually one of the two being scolded. Just how do you do that? Well, Lindner knew how to weave into Maischberger’s questioning that he, of course, had known about the letter to Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Die Grünen) and himself beforehand; almost, but only almost, one could have thought that he had actually been involved in the exercise of the directive competence directed against him. It must be lucky to govern under a chancellor with the authority to set guidelines (and once again one would have liked to know what Müntefering would have said about it).

Lindner wins when not just a half-sentence can be heard from him, as in the “Tagesschau”. But he’s also a bit transparent, and you won’t catch him making an ill-considered sentence. That evening, apart from the boyish enthusiasm with which he impishly revealed that he was under no circumstances allowed to divulge internal information from conversations with the chancellor, he was decidedly supportive of the state, so he did not quibble about the decision to use nuclear power like Wolfgang Kubicki, but expressly emphasized that the result was good and that he would do everything possible to get through this and the next winter well. Maischberger spared him the question of whether the Greens had actually lost in the dispute because three instead of two nuclear power plants had continued to operate, or whether it was the FDP in particular, because they had advocated much longer running times. Once in motion, Lindner even managed to explain at the same time why it is right to abolish sub-budgets to the federal budget and at the same time to set up new ones, but that was a side aspect that evening.

These are hard times, you can’t stop yourself with small things. That evening, everyone thought it was great that the head of government had really banged on the table, nobody spoke badly about a new Basta chancellor. “The traffic light is stable,” assured the Minister of Finance (and one would have liked to have heard Müntefering). Well, then it can go on like this.