“Caren Miosga”: Robert Habeck and the crude symbolism of the Greens

Caren Miosga feigns outrage when she accuses Robert Habeck: “You stole an idea from us!” Habeck asks back, puzzled: “I to you?” Yes, says Miosga, after all Habeck is now also having “table discussions”. Just like her in her studio.

The Green candidate for chancellor has identified the kitchen table as the central location of his election campaign. In his application video, recorded at the kitchen table, he called on voters to invite him into their kitchen and talk about everyday problems. The symbolism is crude: Almost everyone has a kitchen table, from kindergarten teachers to federal ministers – and Habeck apparently wants to be a politician for everyone in the future.

Habeck actually met a kindergarten teacher: a video appeared on his YouTube channel on Sunday showing Habeck visiting Isabell. He introduces himself to her as “Robert” (“Is that right for you?”), scratches the dog (“Grey hair on his cheek like I have on his head”) and praises her kitchen table (“It’s really cool if I do that may say”). There Isabell talks about the stress of having to look after 20 children alone again. Habeck listens, nods, and at the end he promises more money for education and says: “So the next time you hear me on TV talking about more educators, that was you.”

Habeck immediately fulfills the promise at Miosga. In the country’s daycare centers, “there simply isn’t enough staff,” he says. The problem analysis does not go any deeper. Miosga wants to know something else: How authentic are the conversations at the kitchen table when three cameras are running? “How honest is it here?” Habeck asks back flippantly. In fact, he talked to Isabell so easily that they both soon forgot about the cameras. “At least that’s how I perceived it.”

Habeck struggles with the image of being the candidate of an elite that can easily afford climate protection. At Miosga he emphasized several times that he had always taken social compatibility into consideration, even when it came to the controversial heating law. But he explains it so complicatedly (linguistically between “climate gap” and “EEG surcharge”) that only political nerds could have followed it.

Another pompous statement from Habeck this evening is about the difference between him and other politicians: “The answers I give reach the dimension of reality.” Isn’t this exactly the kind of green arrogance that political competitors always accuse the Greens of? Only Robert Habeck, this is how this sentence can be interpreted, knows the answers to this country’s problems. That almost sounds like Angela Merkel, who repeatedly described her policies as having “no alternative.” And Habeck, he confirmed at Miosga, was revered for her “lifetime achievements”.

What’s almost bizarre about this evening is that Miosga addresses Habeck’s campaign video, but not another one that has caused a lot of discussion in recent weeks: At NIUS, the tabloid media of the ousted BILD boss Julian Reichelt, a pensioner reports how he was in his pajamas Had to let police officers into his kitchen. They then searched his house, probably because Robert Habeck had reported the man for calling him an “imbecile.” CDU leader Friedrich Merz acted in a similar way star found out. But Habeck, who is currently trying to present himself as a critical listener, is likely to be particularly damaging by this farce.

It seems to Miosga that the Green candidate for Chancellor seems to have noticed little of this discussion about himself. “We are experiencing a change in mood, especially around my party,” he explains to Miosga. She wrinkles her brow. How does he come up with that, after all, the Greens are only at eleven percent in the polls?

Habeck says things are growing there too, but above all he is noticing the change among party friends. “The mood of the people I talk to is completely different than it was at the traffic lights.” Maybe Habeck still needs to visit a few kitchen tables to be able to say whether this is also the case outside his party.