The Greens live up to their bad reputation. They want to re-educate us. Now a Green family minister is even setting up a denunciation office, where politically incorrect behavior is reported. And Germany’s airport companies are proving to be shockingly inflexible when it comes to dealing with the problems left by the corona crisis.

People used to tell each other about their travels. Today they report on not traveling, on missed flights and lost suitcases. At the regulars’ table, the friends argue about where the chaos is greater: at Cologne Airport or at Frankfurt Airport. “Düsseldorf!” shouts someone in between.

In Cologne, one stopped queuing for two hours. Calf pain, fly away.

In Frankfurt, all rules and learned organizational functions were simply abolished. The entrances where you had to identify yourself with your ticket were all closed. The faster routes for passengers who had paid more were abolished. Thousands of travelers waited in seemingly endless winding aisles until they were told that their plane had already taken off. The next planes were all overbooked. Lufthansa stopped selling tickets. The staff was friendly but powerless.

People landed from the opposite direction whose luggage hadn’t come with them. The “Frankfurter Allgemeine” reported on a clever fellow who quickly bought a cheap ticket upon arrival. Does not matter where. He doesn’t even want to fly. He needs the ticket as an entry ticket to get back to the arrivals hall. Hours later, following the winding path of the waiting people and the passport control, he gets back to where he arrived. In a mountain of luggage lying around unnoticed, he finds his suitcase.

A lucky guy. Elsewhere, children and adults cry, vacation dreams burst, and people have to spend the night in a hotel that Lufthansa pays for.

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At Munich Airport I see a queue of a special kind. People are queuing in front of the counters for missing suitcases. Now the luggage detectives tell them that their luggage could probably not be loaded at the starting point. Several airports have started transporting their passengers’ baggage to their destination by truck.

The cause of most problems is lack of staff. Isn’t there a way – quickly and unbureaucratically, as politicians like to say – to organize a task force from the army of 2.3 million unemployed?

The Greens live up to their bad reputation. They want to re-educate us. As they gain power and influence, they overwhelm us with rules, regulations and prohibitions. Josefine Paul is an example of such activities. The former teacher has been in office as North Rhine-Westphalian Minister for Children, Youth, Family, Equality, Flight and Integration for three weeks.

The Green Minister already wants to push ahead with a project that encourages citizens to denounce their fellow human beings.

She wants to set up four registration offices on the Rhine and Ruhr, where citizens should report if others have not behaved politically correctly. For example, “queer hostile and racist incidents” should be reported. The government plans to invest 140,000 euros in setting up each registration point. The informers should also expressly report incidents that are below the criminal liability limit. Josefine Paul is particularly vigilant in the queer area. The avowed lesbian lives with the Saxon Minister of Justice Katja Meier, who also belongs to the Greens.

FOCUS founding editor-in-chief Helmut Markwort has been a FDP member of the Bavarian state parliament since 2018.