“This may not come across enough in the show, but I have the greatest respect for every single parliamentarian,” says Oliver Welke, presenter of the “heute-show”. “Also in front of ministries, in front of state secretaries and especially the Federal Chancellor,” Welke continued. “It’s simply an absurd, grueling workload. That’s why I’m so sorry that in the general clamor of ‘those up there’, the fact that they are the last people who can be accused of enriching themselves and doing nothing for it is completely lost .”
In the satirical “heute-show”, which has been shown on ZDF on Friday evenings for 15 years now, they would “definitely dish it out in all directions”, explains Welke. “All I can say is that Robert Habeck didn’t speak to us for many months. So when our reporters were outside, he kept walking. Similar to what some Union politicians, including Friedrich Merz, are now doing “If we tried to run away from us, he did that too.” As with every satirical program, in the “heute-show” over the last three years, “the parties currently in power have received more in percentage terms than opposition parties, including the AfD. But of course I can’t pretend for parity reasons that this is the case AfD is a completely normal party. That’s not possible.”
With regard to dealing with the AfD, Welke explains: “Issues like the AfD, which are and will continue to be recurring, then at some point you have to realize that you yourself – this is not just an accusation against politicians – left it too much at simply saying, “Be careful, they’re very right-wing!”
The exciting phenomenon, said Welke, referring to the parliamentary elections in Austria, “is that, especially now in Austria, we have two parties, the FPÖ and AfD, in German-speaking countries of all places, that no longer have to try to buck the trend in Europe to somehow appear more moderate, but they have succeeded in becoming more radical in German-speaking countries. I don’t have an answer to that yet and I don’t know exactly why it’s so different in France or Italy Secret of success exactly the opposite. What does that tell us about ourselves and why is that?
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