Society isn’t split in half, but the smaller part is too big to ignore. If Chancellor Scholz wants to maintain the cohesion of the country, he must not downplay the division.
The climate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people is becoming noticeably harsher, the police can no longer keep up with the many pseudo-harmless “walks” of those who refuse vaccinations, and very determined people go outside the houses of politicians with burning torches. That is the situation, that is the one world, the real one. The new Federal Chancellor, it seems, lives in another: Olaf Scholz claims almost every day that German society is “not divided”. It is just a “minority” who are more or less creaking resistance.
You can’t make it that easy for yourself, especially not as Chancellor. You don’t have to conjure up the next “terrorist cell” right away, but the country currently has a tangible problem, and simply trying to define it away will get you nowhere. Every child knows: a split is a rift through a whole that is no longer intact as a result. German society is not split in the middle, i.e. in half, but it is in the line of 75 percent against 25 percent, maybe also with 80 percent against 20 percent. In any case, the smaller part is far too big for politicians to be able to define it out of the whole in the long term, just to claim like Olaf Scholz: The rest is okay, go ahead, there is nothing to see here.
The split into an exhausted, annoyed majority on the one hand and a stubborn minority on the other hand is particularly delicate because the civilized dealings between majority and minority (s) touch the core of every democracy. And as little understanding as voluntarily unvaccinated people have deserved, there is one point about the extensive 2G rules that exclude them from large parts of public life: These rules apply indefinitely. Unlike in the past, there is no prospect of possible loosening, and neither are they linked to the achievement of certain goals, for example a vaccination rate of 80 percent or the long-term undershooting of a certain incidence number.
Putting more than ten million adults in Germany under such pressure can certainly be justified in terms of the whole: no higher vaccination rate, no permanent return to normalcy for everyone. But: Of course that brings with it a split, the longer the deeper, probably the deeper. If politicians are determined to adopt such rules in the interests of a majority, then they must not lack the courage to call the price by its name: division.
In his own words, Olaf Scholz wants to be a chancellor “also the unvaccinated”. As long as he shrugs off the rift through villages, workforces, groups of friends and families, nobody needs to believe him: not the vaccinated and certainly not the unvaccinated. The cohesion of the country can only be preserved if you recognize where it is breaking down.