Let’s start with a short one: Hurray! We are not yet Austria. That is reason to be happy. Beyond high mountains and green valleys, our neighbors are not to envy the political landscape. We now know that it is also possible in Germany after a tough election campaign to have conversations that result in a coalition.
Even if it is no longer a grand coalition that Friedrich Merz will soon lead, it is one that has found each other without the usual tamtam – without night sessions and dramatic doors. The negotiations of the “19er round” went almost silently.
The grand coalition is faster for two weeks than the traffic lights
It works. Is still going. And if it has to be, it is even quick: just 45 days have passed since the election Sunday – and even exactly two weeks less than SPD, Greens and FDP in autumn 2021 had needed to forge the traffic light. One can and should probably even read this as a sign that the parties involved – Merz, Klingbeil, Söder, Esken and the others – have now really understood the seriousness of the situation.
And what time is that: this country is in a recession for the third year in a row. As long as a new land war rages in Ukraine. In defense issues, we can no longer rely on the United States, the United States is now waging a crazy customs war against us. A war that could ruin the business model of our export nation.
Therefore – in mind or not – it is now very quickly needed to act. With a government at the top that helps to lead Europe to one, perhaps even. A government that relieves companies. Which renews the infrastructure with its new billions and upgrades the Bundeswehr, which thinned out the bureaucracy, contains illegal migration and under no circumstances continues where the old man has stopped.
What the country would need bitter: a pinch of optimism
What this country really needed is a government that manages to spread a decent pinch of optimism for a change. Hope that everything is not lost. Believe that it can even get better.
It would be the right answer to the lousy jums, the eternal “it was clear that they couldn’t get it up there again!”, A basic mood on which the AfD has eaten fat and fat for years.
Yes, maybe no new Space Ministry is needed, but the universe will survive.
No, Heinz-Dieter, with “the many money” we shouldn’t have finished a new petrol price brake.
Yes, more relief for small and medium -sized incomes would have been nice.
No, it is not rejected at the border from day 1, and nuclear power does not return.
Yes, this contract contains fewer reforms than would be necessary to permanently relieve the social systems.
Honesty not only requires courage, it also costs approval. In troubled times when dwindling consent lands frightfully with the AfD, you think twice about how much imposition you trust people.
There may be people, said Markus Söder, who would now criticize, “man, at line 2419, something is missing”, he would answer them: “Fits Scho”. And maybe Söder found the actual title of this contract: just instead of “responsibility for Germany” – it fits.
It is time for realism. It is not about the sensitivities of individual parties. What the left, the liberal or lame wing means to this or that point of the coalition agreement is right to the citizens.
What matters now is more pragmatism and a little more of the Rhenish “Jönnekönne”. It will be more than difficult for Friedrich Merz anyway ,. Nobody in front of him took over this job with such a mortgage.
So at the end a request: Could we stop doing this as if this government was the last cartridge of democracy? As if she had nothing but the new fascism after her? End of history, end of the world? Of course, this small grand coalition has to be successful, but you shouldn’t make the mistake of confusing it with Amazon: it has to do a good job, achieve results – it cannot and does not have to deliver it at the push of a button.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
