You know that, for example from shampoos or motor oil. If an item is no longer doing so well, an ingredient is simply mixed in, and we good customers think we are buying a completely innovative product. So: “Revolutionary formula thanks to enzyme boosters”. Or: “Now new: With Speedflutsch 2000 additive”.
This is now also the case for politics. Because one notices in the traffic light that after more than a year full of turning points and double banging, customer interest in the brand future coalition is waning, so it now exists, spectacularly, “with a built-in opposition function”. The most recent examples: Robert Habeck announced that gas and oil heating would be abolished as quickly as possible, and the FDP dismissed the project coldly. Not coordinated, we don’t know, we don’t want to. Conversely, the left-wing ecologists accuse the liberal Minister of Transport Wissing of “breaking the law” because he had promised to overturn the end of combustion engines if no exception was allowed for e-fuels. There is no better way to argue with the Union than with one another.
The reason for this is also clear: the FDP has to score points with its electorate after losing state elections, the Greens need a bully counterweight to their clear and reasonable anti-Putin course in order not to lose the city Indians and the Wollsocken faction. But this game is high risk. German voters are harmony-conscious customers, they want things to work. Anyone who argues will be punished.
This has just been experienced by the gloomy government front in Berlin, where all three warring parties lost and helped the CDU to triumph. In the exploratory talks, the somewhat confusingly derived “More of our politics” course, which the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party took, led to the unthinkable actually happening and the left-wing coalition not being continued despite ideological proximity.
At least SPD state leader Franziska Giffey is considering joining a black-red alliance as a junior partner. Motto: it is better to rule calmly than to rule in a quarrel. This is a warning for the quarrels of the two small partners in the federation. A grand coalition would also have a majority in the Reichstag. In theory, Olaf Scholz could take the Ampel product off the market if the new ingredients had undesirable side effects. Constant itching, for example.
