Despite urgent warnings from its own experts, the federal government cannot bring itself to impose drastic measures in the fight against the Omikron variant before Christmas. The coalition’s smallest partner is leading the way. The FDP did not understand a central lesson in questions of the pandemic.
Civil rights and data protection activists have popped one or two champagne corks since the FDP entered the federal government. The FDP’s understanding of the rule of law and freedom is an important corrective to Germany’s liberal democracy, as shown, for example, by the planned abolition of Paragraph 219a or data retention. But precisely in the two most important crises of the present, the pandemic and the climate crisis, the FDP is vastly wrong. And the new Chancellor, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, translates this erroneous assumption into practical policy: that freedoms should not be restricted preventively as a matter of principle. But this way Germany will never come before the next corona wave, but always only get out of the must when there have already been many avoidable victims.
The second Prime Minister’s Conference since Scholz took office is an example of the wrong path the traffic light government has allowed itself to be driven by the smallest of the three coalition partners. On Sunday, its own panel of experts issued an urgent warning of the effects of the Omikron variant. Apparently shaped by previous experience that Corona policy too often falls short of the demands of the government’s own Robert Koch Institute, its President Lothar Wieler, shortly before the start of the conference, calls for drastic measures in an unusual step now instead of after Christmas. But the federal-state group cannot agree on this.
The FDP way is a high stakes bet
The silence at the turn of the year will not be carried forward nationwide through extended daycare and school holidays in January, nor will there be nationwide closings in retail, restaurants and hotels at least until the end of January, when the goal of a further 30 million vaccinations set by the MPK is to be achieved. The reintroduction of the epidemic situation at national level, which is necessary for closures, should be decided on January 7th at the earliest – depending on whether the Omikron variant has already started to rage in Germany. The federal government is failing to give companies and families planning security. And that only in the hope of being able to keep their promise that children no longer have to stay at home and that the badly battered catering industry and retail trade will not be burdened again. However, numerous scientists are certain that this cannot be avoided.
Germany was faced with a choice on Tuesday: lockdown now or wait for a possible partial collapse of the supply system and then impose a hard lockdown. The chosen strategy follows the old principle of hope that the Corona experts are wrong this time and that it won’t turn out that bad. It’s a risky bet. The FDP in particular is willing to accept them. With luck, she can later say: “You were right, freedom defended!”. Lockdown advocates do not have this prospect of triumph. If Corona measures take effect, nothing escalates and no one knows afterwards for sure whether it was due to the measures or whether they would not have been necessary in the first place. If you are hoping for applause, you better bet on the FDP. The fact that the SPD and the Greens do not enjoy playing so much everywhere is demonstrated by the special vote of the green-led Baden-Württemberg and the stricter rules in the SPD-ruled states of Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Flying blind through the turn of the year
Scholz’s giving in to the FDP is doubly risky: Germany is not only threatening to fall behind the fifth wave, instead of preventing it, Germany is also going into the collective blind flight. Omikron is already in the country, but will build up relatively unobserved for the next two to three weeks before the exponential growth suddenly unfolds its force. There were already major delays in reporting around the turn of the year. After all, practices and laboratories also go on vacation, and students and employees are withdrawn from the test system between years. It could be that the MPK does not yet have a complete overview of the Omikron events when they meet again on January 7th. Does the traffic light want to postpone a lockdown again on suspicion? To spoil the holidays for people in January and February is no more pleasant to convey than to impose stricter rules in the week before Christmas. Unless you need the escalation of the situation as an aid to argumentation. But that would be cowardly.
In view of the continued broad approval of the population for consistent Corona measures, Scholz should have had more courage and risked displeasure from the smallest coalition partner. In the future, too, he will only agree to restrictions on freedom when the reason for these restrictions has long since escalated. The FDP has apparently not yet learned from the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court on climate protection: in the summer, Karlsruhe had ordered the federal government to set more ambitious climate goals in the present so that people would not be imposed even more drastic restrictions in the future because they had to catch up with decarbonization, what was missed today. In short: Anyone who argues against individual restrictions with reference to a climate dictatorship provokes that the radical measures that one wanted to avoid will actually be necessary in the future. The situation is similar with the alleged Corona dictatorship. If significant parts of the critical infrastructure should only work to a limited extent in the new year, the individual costs would be much higher than if a lockdown had already occurred. The traffic lights have to make this clear to the citizens and to themselves – especially the self-proclaimed constitutional and scientific party FDP.