Thursday, November 18, 2021
“We run full”
Merkel speaks of a dramatic corona situation
The heads of government of the federal and state levels want to adopt joint measures against the dramatic corona situation. The Executive Chancellor describes how dramatic this is. According to Merkel, individual instruments will soon no longer be available.
The Executive Chancellor Angela Merkel described the drama of the corona situation during the consultations with the heads of government of the federal states. According to participants, the CDU politician spoke of a very drastic situation and an emergency. “We’re running full,” she said, according to matching media reports. Merkel said that individual instruments would soon no longer be available. In addition, the vaccination pick is too big.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst, currently chairman of the federal-state conference, therefore reiterated his criticism. The possibilities of the countries were not enough, said the CDU politician according to participants. In addition to the heads of government of the federal states and Merkel, the SPD candidate for chancellor and Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz took part in the video conference, along with other executive federal ministers.
According to the participants, Scholz defended the new legal basis for the corona policy decided by the Bundestag, which is supported by the traffic light parties SPD, Greens and FDP. The SPD politician referred to a wide range of measures to break the fourth wave. These went well beyond the previous instruments.
The package of measures provides, among other things, requirements for proof of vaccination, recovery or test (3G) at the workplace and in transport. The Federal Council still has to give its approval, but the Union threatens to reject it.
The federal-state group is looking for nationally uniform assessment standards for the application of stricter corona protective measures. The debate is about whether a threshold will be defined for Covid-19 patients in hospitals, beyond which special access restrictions should be imposed in public life. Various preliminary draft resolutions are available for this purpose.