Fighting zone East Germany: How Prime Minister was hardened

The morning sun seemed warm, but not too warm on the pyramids of Giza. A few birds performed their toilet on the head of the Sphinx. Tourists were hardly yet visible, just a small column made of black limousines and white minibuses, along with a police motorcycle.

In the midst of this world -wise arrangement there was a man who looked exactly as the head of government of the Free State of Saxony, only that he wore an atypically relaxed smile on his face. In contrast to his other public appearance, Michael Kretschmer actually looked satisfied with himself and this absurd world. He almost appeared to me, yes, I dare a big word: freed.

But as beautiful as the moment was, it would not linger. He only marked the end of a business trip that lasted Summa Summarum for 48 hours, including those eight hours, in which Kretschmer squeezed into an Economy seat by Egypt Air.

The Prime Minister met the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Education, visited a labor migration project, stopped by in the Adenauer Foundation office-and, this was the actual occasion of the excursion, the Saxon-Egyptian university opened, which, which has to be explicitly, does not have to harm, as an IHK training center worked and that, so Allah, will soon be. Radeberg or Crimmitschau should send.

So Kretschmer had been dragged hundreds of kilometers through the ten-million pairo and his semi-finished millions of millions in blue light-witness. He had given speeches and gave interviews and otherwise listened. And listened. And listened. In between he fingered on his cell phone to place the eastern CDU interests from the African distance in the coalition agreement.

While major construction sites appeared in the entourage of the Prime Minister, shivering endless construction sites or in frozen ministerial buildings, I watched a politician who sometimes appears like a Sphinx. In his quarrels and his contradictions, this Kretschmer simply does not want to insert himself into the usual grid of interpretation.

This is probably due to the fact that the Prime Minister feels just as misunderstood as a growing part of East Germans. In the capital, he is considered a Putinist to many, who now also investigates the Egyptian military dictatorship. At home in Lusatia, he is put as a traitor who has not only cheated on people at Corona. And meanwhile the Prime Minister is plagued with a minority government and billion -deficit and the Pegidists bother him in front of his holiday home, he encountered him in Berlin, which is disguised as a question, why the AfD is getting stronger.

The fact that Kretschmer is reacting to this ever annoying is in individual gradations in common with Reiner Haseloff from Saxony-Anhalt, Manuela Schwesig from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Dietmar Woidke from Brandenburg and Mario Voigt from Thuringia. You are tired of having to justify yourself for something that has a lot to do with the coincidences of the time runs and rather little with the possibilities of your office. And they find it at least unfair that a Boris Rhein from Hesse or a Markus Söder from Bavaria is hardly asked for the AfD, although the party is now almost 20 percent, which would have been a big scandal four or five years ago, when this was only in the east of the extreme things.

In view of all these circumstances, it is like this: Nowhere in Germany is political business harder than in the area that joined the Federal Republic 35 years ago. And nowhere is it easier to fail as the head of government.

In the beginning everything happened at once. The establishment of the administration and the reduction of the GDR economy. The emigration of young people and the immigration of West German officials and judges. At the same time, a gently muffling rumor was enough to end a political career.

In parallel to the progressive mass unemployment and de-industrialization, the PDS became increasingly stronger, which started the first of the Wie-Blöd-Sind-Diese-Ossis-Settish debates. Since then, a central task of East German politicians has been to explain to West German politicians and journalists that the vast majority of East Germans do not want to have the GDR again or even the Nazis without prejudice to their part, but that despite all the billions of funding and democracy programs, they felt second -class and suspended.

But hardly anyone wanted to hear about it. Instead, Hartz IV came.

As a result, the PDS ruled more and more. In Thuringia, she took over the State Chancellery as a newly made left, while the Hessian Senior Study Councilor Björn Höcke moved into the state parliament. With the AfD, the majorities became narrower and the coalitions became more unstable. In the meantime, it is a great achievement if a state government with the help of the left division BSW comes to a parliamentary stalemate.

Anyone who is prime minister in the east lives about as adventurous as a train as a train on a trip through Cairo’s completely crazy traffic. He has to get through between dogmas, federal specifications and delimitation resolutions in order to find more or less inappropriate coalition partners, with which he may form a narrow majority when it is going really well.

Either way, he can be happy if he is elected by the state parliament in the second ballot. The occasional prime ministers, sorry, are expressly meant.

The so -called governance, which then follows, exists, except for a short period of rest, in the administration of the notorious lack of money, the pacification of the permanent protest and the maintenance of rural infrastructure. In the meantime, the defense of the democratic institutions has also been added.

Anyone who rules in the east goes through a hardening process. And that does something with people. If Manuela Schwesig says that she cannot become a minister and SPD chair in Berlin because she has to save her Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from the AfD in the state election next year, it may sound rather pathetic or maybe a bit presumptuous. But it is the description of reality.

In Saxony, this reality means, for example, that Michael Kretschmer somehow has to make it to get the state budget despite the lack of billions and voices through the state parliament, with whom. The BSW people will want world peace, continue to snap the Greens and the reanimated left rehearsals the class struggle, while the AfD should prefer to work on all the other and the so-called system.

So if you read this in the area of ​​the Federal Republic within the borders of 1989, the next time you wonder why the East German Prime Minister – and the East German Prime Minister – sometimes a little, well, are different from her friendly colleagues from Mainz, Kiel or Hanover, please keep in mind that there are other conditions in the East combat zone.

At least still. Because be sure: the expansion has started.

You can find all Martin Debes columns published so far .