Bodo Ramelow: A behavioral moss in all cases in the Bundestag

And then it just happened on Tuesday. The 21st German Bundestag had chosen its presidium – and for the first time since 1990 there was no natives of the area that included the sphere of activity of the Basic Law almost 35 years ago.

No East German and no East German, nowhere.

The absence was expected to be critically reflected on, and this is equally exclusively exclusively by East Germans. However, some of them confessed what I had to share in the end, which I also had to shake up at this point: A large part of the people in the east chose the AfD’s decision itself.

Even the party that “the east had been doing it” also set up a West German candidate for the Bundestag Presidium. If the AfD man Gerold Otten had been chosen: he would have cemented the western hegemony even more.

Because there is also Bodo Ramelow, who is now serving the Left Party as Vice President of the Bundestag. Born in Lower Saxony, who grew up in Rhineland-Palatinate and became a trade unionist in Hesse, came to Thuringia in February 1990 to stay. In the meantime he has spent 35 of his 69 years in Erfurt and completed the metamorphosis to the Ossi HC.

Ramelow has long lived the East German identity more aggressively than the vast majority of East Germans. Hardly anyone else can describe the structural disadvantage of the East. At the same time, and this is really paradoxical, he still acts as an involuntary representative of that old Federal Republican paternalism, which ranges from the gloss-and-gloria king Kurt Biedenkopf to the old-age mild regent Bernhard Vogel to extreme recording entrepreneur Björn Höcke.

As a result, the entire complexity of the reunification process is reflected in Ramelow’s biography. And it is reflected in his dazzling personality, both in his chronic presumption and in his self -worn out.

When I met Ramelow, the current millennium was only a few months old. He, the transverse ex-trade union secretary, was very fresh for the PDS in the Thuringian state parliament, but already gave himself like the true opposition leader. He attacked the CDU under Bernhard Vogel, who was reigned, with unrealed hardness and thus opened the competition between two western alpha men.

Vogel had inhaled the anti-communism of Adenauer and Kohl-CDU. Ramelow had been politically socialized in the Marburg DKP environment. Now they continued the class struggle of the past FRG in Thuringia.

I was at the end of 20 and had little idea of ​​practical politics, but gave the hyper -critical state reporter all the wet researcher. My first appointment should be an exclusive background discussion in which Ramelow had promised my newspaper information on how the state government misused EU funding-which was largely confirmed later.

But Ramelow didn’t want to talk to me. He had expected my boss and now seemed very snapped. I will never forget how he stormed out of the small, completely overheated attic, which his office was, stormed with furor and slammed the door behind him. But while I was trying to regain my version, he came back, stood on a blackboard and started to upload the country’s company participations, including the obscure, flows as if nothing had happened.

From then on I met the local chief Ramelow and his sensitive ego from time to time. Its inner permasy voltage had to come loose at erratic intervals, and then it was quickly good again. Little has changed in this pattern to this day.

But the politician Ramelow developed. In the quarter of a century, in which I was allowed to accompany him (and sometimes also had to), the polemic radical oppositions became a pragmatic and conciliatory head of government. At the same time, the Wessi mutated into a Wossi and finally to someone who not only understands how East Germans work, but can actually feel it.

This was the only way to Ramelow as a native West German, the East party PDS could lead to record values ​​and then form them as a fusion officer. This was the only way to form a tight coalition with the SPD and the Greens and, with just one voice, to become the first and probably also the only left of all left-wing prime minister. And this was the only way to apply from his government office for the Bundestag in order to then win his Erfurt constituency, the only one in Thuringia that the AfD did not get.

So now Ramelow is sitting in the Presidium of the Bundestag, the parliament, which he once belonged to for four years in one of his seven political life. It can be assumed that he will stand up for the east in his new function, when the three East German women previously did together.

This does not reduce anything from what Petra Pau, Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Yvonne Magwas did as vice president. They just are not Bodo Ramelow. They were not voted out as Prime Minister with the help of the AfD and were back in office just a month later. And of course you are not asked when Verdi and Berlin’s transport companies are looking for someone to settle their really exhausting tariff dispute.

Therefore, Bodo Ramelow should now ensure that when I am in Berlin, I no longer have to stand in front of a closed subway station due to strikes. After that, however, he has to tackle his next historical task. In the absence of births at the head of the government, parliament and coalition parties, he, the behavioral, in all cases, has to fill out the representation gap all by himself.

As I know it, he naturally dares to do that. What else.

You can find all Martin Debes columns published so far .