Politicians who narrowly missed the column this week

You can find my column here every week. Maybe you’re sometimes a bit curious about what it’s about this time. Can I tell you something? I feel the same way.

It happens that I don’t yet know the topic of the column when I wake up in the morning on the day it goes to press. The evening before I go to sleep, I’m often tormented by one last thought: Why did you write about the topic, the other one would have been better?

The search for a topic is an ongoing process. You see, hear, read something, a message, a saying, a number, a trend, something touching, something funny, some big nonsense. You check, weigh, ask yourself whether it stands for something that is worth a column, create initial formulations and then discard everything again. There are significantly more topics that didn’t become columns than topics that I dealt with. The creation process not only leaves around 3,500 characters, but also a large pile of residual mental waste.

You should be part of that this week. Therefore, do not read a reflection on a specific topic, but instead read what you have been spared.

There is Olaf Scholz’s speech at the SPD party conference. The Chancellor spoke 19 times about the “ordinary people” on whom he based his election program. This sparse formulation is the rhetorical remnant of a famous and extremely descriptive sentence from Bill Clinton. In his 1992 nomination speech, he spoke about those Americans “who do the work, pay taxes, raise children and play by the rules.” You could imagine something like that. Scholz’s “normal people” may be politically well-intentioned – but the comparison to Clinton shows how anemic the Chancellor’s communication in the election campaign has been so far. His language is simply incomprehensible. But that can only be the topic of a column again when things finally change.

What about Friedrich Merz and his scandalous proposal to revoke the German passport of dual citizens in the event of a serious crime? The motto here is that you shouldn’t enhance a bad and probably unconstitutional idea, with which Merz only wants to make himself popular with AfD voters, by dedicating a column to it. This also misses the opportunity to once again show the difference between Angela Merkel and Friedrich Merz, because in 2016 the Chancellor had the courage to oppose a CDU party conference resolution against dual citizenship. But Merkel herself no longer attaches great importance to differences with Merz. Why should I spend 3500 characters on it?

“And I can tell you, when we’re in charge, we’ll tear down all the wind turbines.” This comes from Alice Weidel. “Down with these windmills of shame,” the AfD candidate for chancellor shouted at her party conference. “All wind power plants”, that would be more than 30,000, cost per demolition between 50,000 and 150,000 euros, i.e. around three billion euros. Afterwards, Weidel said that she didn’t mean all wind turbines, but only 18 controversial ones in a forest area in Hesse. However, Weidel couldn’t tear them down because they haven’t even been built yet. But do you want to read another text about the AfD, which is so prone to being misunderstood?

I’m really excited to see what this week’s column is about.