Does Friedrich Merz want to become Chancellor? One does not know. What we now know: He is the type of person you can only rely on as long as there is no trouble.
As a leader, how do you ruin someone’s reputation? You agree to attend a conference. There is criticism about the planned appearance. The person with whom you have an appointment for a public conversation is considered a right-wing hardliner.
Participation is canceled again – not because of the meeting with the hardliner, for which one was attacked, but because one allegedly came across two names in the supporting program that make participation impossible.
Message number one: You would have met the right Trump friend, but not the other two birds. Message number two: anyone who invites the two back onto a podium in the future is not entirely sane.
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I’m on summer vacation in America with my family. Many messages from home reach you with a delay.
But the fact that the CDU chairman Friedrich Merz canceled his appearance at a conference in Berlin because, in addition to the Republican senator (and Trump friend) Lindsey Graham, the journalist Henryk M. Broder and the lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel were to speak there, I have that noticed even in distant Connecticut. Some things may take longer until you find out about them, but you get annoyed more.
I have known Henryk Broder since I moved from Hamburg to Berlin for the “Spiegel” 30 years ago. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, even though we’ve sided with some of the fights. Friendship connected, that’s perhaps the best way to describe it. Maybe that’s why I take the story so seriously.
Broder was already fighting the fools left and right of center when many still believed that true idiots only existed on the right. Every interview with him contains more truth packaged in sottisen than most journalists can manage in a lifetime of truth and sottisen. Above all, he is absolutely incorruptible. Six weeks ago he ended his commitment to the “Weltwoche” because he felt that he no longer fit in there.
And now I have to read in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” that when I studied the list of participants in the “Transatlantic Forum”, i.e. the planned event with Merz and Graham in Berlin, I noticed in the Merz office that Henryk M. Broder and Joachim Steinhöfel were intended as speakers, “two bullies on the right-wing fringe of the democratic spectrum, with whose party political representation, the AfD, CDU and CSU do not want to work in any way”?
I have no idea what the “FAZ” or the CDU party headquarters mean by cooperation: Participation in a forum in which different opinions collide is not, according to popular belief, part of it.
You probably wouldn’t have even seen each other. Merz was scheduled to appear at 2 p.m., Broder and Steinhöfel at 10 a.m. The program had also been fixed for weeks, but perhaps on principle one does not read conference programs in the Adenauer House beyond the appearance of the party chairman.
As far as AfD proximity is concerned, the desire also seems to be the father of the assertion. Broder once gave a speech to the AfD parliamentary group, on which you can only congratulate him if you have read it.
Steinhöfel pledged his legal counsel when the then party chairman Jörg Meuthen was looking for a lawyer who was willing to represent the AfD in the party expulsion proceedings against Nazis such as the Brandenburg AfD leader Andreas Kalbitz. The Nazi liability of the AfD then progressed despite Kalbitz being thrown out, after which Steinhöfel resigned his mandate.
I don’t know what other plans Friedrich Merz has. It may be enough for him to be party leader and parliamentary group leader of the CDU, he would like that. But maybe he also wants to become chancellor. At a certain level, politicians dare to do anything, it seems almost inevitable. If you asked Manuela Schwesig if she didn’t think she had what it takes to be Chancellor, she would definitely say yes.
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Let’s imagine Merz as Federal Chancellor. We now know: He’s the type of person you can only count on as long as there’s no trouble. In the meantime I had gotten a different impression. I found him to be resilient under pressure.
Now I know he’s just a sausage. A very rich sausage, no question, with nice new glasses and a pilot’s license. The pilot’s license immediately won me over to him. Franz Josef Strauss also had one. But unfortunately that’s all that connects Merz with Strauss.
The crux of the modern conservatives is that they want to get on with the wrong people. A leftist would never consider seeking the approval of the other side. Either he doesn’t care how they think about him in the opponent’s camp. Or, on the contrary, he is even proud that they hate him there. Anyone who does not choose him can remain stolen from him.
The conservative cannot think like that. Konstantin von Notz from the Greens writes on Twitter that Merz no longer has all the slats on the fence? In the Merz team, their pants are trembling with fear.
The “Süddeutsche” thinks that it is not appropriate for the leader of the largest opposition party to meet a man like Graham, who thinks Trump is great? Oh god, how do we get out of this? Let’s just say we didn’t know about the program!
Of course, on the left, you would never let yourself be told who you can sit down with and who you can’t. As a lawyer, Hans-Christian Ströbele has even represented real-life terrorists who not only dreamed of unhinging the system, but also tried to do so with guns in their hands.
Did that stop the Greens from nominating him as a direct candidate for the federal elections? Of course not. Did he then sit on the secret committee of the Bundestag without the other factions having raised any objections? Why, surely. If someone had written that you shouldn’t work with people like Ströbele because of his mandates, they would have died laughing at the Greens.
Sometimes I think back to Helmut Kohl. How would Kohl have reacted? Quite simply: if someone like Notz had ranted, he would have come twice to the conference that he would have been told not to go to. When in doubt, he was also responsible for mistakes made by others.
The best insurance for a minister in distress was comments calling for his immediate removal. As a matter of principle, Kohl stuck to the person whose head was now being demanded everywhere. Manfred Wörner survived the Kießling scandal, for which he should have resigned as defense minister, and Rita Süssmuth survived her flight affair.
Merz was one of the first to break away from Kohl. You have to increase the distance, sharpen the tone, he explained when the donation scandal broke out. He was parliamentary group leader and Kohl had just been voted out as chancellor. He had already learned from his mother that “the hand that blesses is bitten first”, Kohl then confided in his “diary”.
It took Merz 22 years to finally become what he had hoped to become back then. Betrayal doesn’t always pay off for the traitor.
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
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