“I think it has never happened before, that we have the result on Sunday afternoon and the decisions on Tuesday afternoon,” says Olaf Scholz. In corona politics, he does not appear as a driver of hesitant prime ministers, but as a team player. Only the RKI disturbs the consensus. And of course the old dispute over the epidemic situation.
It has only been two weeks since Olaf Scholz was elected Chancellor – you have to look again in the calendar to see whether it is really only two weeks, because considering the pandemic, it feels like two months. When Angela Merkel handed over the office to him at that time, he said to her that he wanted to build on the “northeast German mentality” that had prevailed in the Chancellery up to now. “That won’t change that much.”
After everything that was observed at the press conference after the Prime Minister’s Conference on Tuesday, it can be said that Scholz wants to change a little bit.
It is Scholz’s second Prime Minister’s Conference as Federal Chancellor and thus only the second Corona MPK without Merkel, and Scholz is clearly trying to spread a bit of a new beginning. He emphasized several times that the recommendation of the expert council – which he had just set up – was the basis for the decision of the Bund-Länder round. He describes the current situation as “a strange time in between”: The number of infections and even the occupancy rates in intensive care units have declined. “So we’re slowly getting a grip on the fourth wave.”
But now “wave five”, the new virus variant, is already looming. Omikron will massively increase the number of infections, “we have to be prepared for that now”. It is only a matter of a few weeks before this virus variant prevails.
The question arises as to why the measures decided by the country chiefs and himself do not already apply at Christmas. The time after Christmas was chosen deliberately, says Scholz, and this is where the first difference to Merkel becomes clear. Scholz warns, but he does not present himself as a driver of hesitant prime ministers, but as a team player. Ultimately, his team includes everyone who wants to belong. The experiences of the past two years have shown, says Scholz, that Christmas and Easter are not major pandemic drivers because the families behaved responsibly.
“We are all crumbling and tired”
He puts an emphasis on signaling compassion. “I would have liked to have given you better news just before the Christmas holidays,” he says into the camera. “This pandemic is exhausting for all of us, we are all frail and tired of the pandemic. But that doesn’t help. We have to stand together again and in many cases keep our distance.”
With all the bad news, it is obvious that he also wants to exude optimism. The vaccination campaign will continue “with undiminished vigor” over the holidays, the goal of 30 million vaccinations will be achieved by the end of the year, and another 30 million vaccinations will be given by the end of January. Without setting a time, he strives for an “intermediate goal” of a vaccination rate of 80 percent, “and when we have achieved that, we have to look at the next goal”.
It becomes clear that there has been some crunch behind the scenes when the incumbent MPK chairman, the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst, takes the floor. Wüst points out that shortly before the MPK, the Robert Koch Institute presented recommendations “which in some areas do not agree with the views of the Federal Government and go beyond the recommendations of the Expert Council”. It’s the elephant in the room. Unlike in the past, not many quotations were made public from the conference between the heads of state government and the Chancellor. This already: Health Minister Karl Lauterbach had said that it was “not ideal and not coordinated” that the RKI had demanded “maximum contact restrictions” shortly before the federal-state round. “You certainly don’t have to share the RKI’s view on every single point, but from my point of view it is important that the RKI is shown the respect it deserves,” says Wüst.
Scholz remains unmoved
The information policy of “the federal government in the broadest sense”, that is, of the council of experts and the RKI, which is a federal authority, was “chaotic” and led to uncertainty. “One can criticize that too,” said Wüst, “but to criticize the institution for this, as I have in part taken from media reports, is inappropriate”. It becomes clear that this is a question of style, not content.
One can only speculate about what prompted the RKI to place its paper on that day. Scholz points out that the decision of the Expert Council was made unanimously – including the representative of the RKI. Scholz does not specifically emphasize that it is RKI President Lothar Wieler himself who is a member of the committee. He just says that he is “very grateful” for the work of the institute.
When a journalist asks the Chancellor that Wüst had just called the federal government’s communications chaotic, he said as unmoved as Merkel in her best days: “The federal government organized very good communication.” He is “very happy that we have now done exactly what we set out to do together,” namely to implement the recommendation of the expert committee quickly. “I think it has never happened before, that we have the result on Sunday afternoon and the decisions on Tuesday afternoon. It’s something.”
“That was a clear mistake”
One of the resolutions is that the critical infrastructure companies should prepare for the high levels of sick leave threatened by Omikron. The RKI is currently working out a recommendation as to whether the quarantine rules for employees of such companies – such as hospitals, energy suppliers, police and fire services – should be relaxed, says Scholz.
Pressure is wreaking havoc on mandatory vaccinations. Scholz said in November that he expected implementation in February. “That must be true.” It is currently unclear whether the vaccination will be compulsory so early; the mandatory vaccination for health and nursing staff decided by the Ampelkoalition does not apply until mid-March. However, Scholz confirms that he considers a general vaccination requirement to be necessary regardless of progress in the vaccination quota.
A real conflict only emerges when assessing whether the traffic light has made a mistake in not prolonging the epidemic of national importance. In response to a corresponding question, Wüst says that it was “a clear mistake” – the Union argues that this decision means that the countries are lacking measures in the fight against Corona, the traffic light holds against it, instead new measures have been introduced. “I would not speak of a clear mistake here,” says Berlin’s Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey, who took up office only hours before and is now MPK deputy chairwoman at the same time. The end of the epidemic situation was “decided in a different situation”. Then she suggests that there could be a return to the old regulation. At the next MPK on January 7th, they will evaluate how “Omikron has developed”.
In any case, Scholz does not want to know anything about conflicts between the federal government and the federal states: “Perhaps it is something that has to be perceived anew, but we act very amicably,” he says. Whether that is enough is another question. “It looks like a certain amount of window dressing, which should perhaps reassure people over Christmas,” Corona modeler Thorsten Lehr said in front of the MPK about the looming resolutions. He thinks this is “absolutely inadequate”.