Mainz / Stuttgart –
Elections can still be won with popularity and charisma. Malu Dreyer with the SPD and Winfried Kretschmann with the Greens in the Palatinate and in the Ländle have shown that again, our author thinks.
The SPD in particular was sorely in need of success. However, one cannot speak of a trend reversal. Thanks to Dreyer, the SPD can cheer in Mainz, but it crashed in Baden-Württemberg.
But the CDU will also have to romp about in the state elections after the bitter bankruptcy. Your credit is shrinking rapidly at the moment – accelerated by the Raffkes from your own ranks. It will be difficult to make up for the loss of confidence – especially for party leader Armin Laschet, who, like CSU leader Markus Söder, is now called upon to clean out the mess. Declarations of honor are not enough.
Once the impression should solidify that, like in a banana republic, politicians are abusing their mandate as a self-service shop, the fun is over. On Sunday, the CDU was probably just lucky that the defeat was not even greater because many postal voters had already cast their vote when the scandal became public.
Together with the mask scandal, the election fiasco is a poisonous cocktail with considerable risks and side effects for the Union as a whole, which has also still not answered its candidate for chancellor. Because something always sticks. And all of this against the background of the really big crisis that the country has been stumbling through for more than a year.
Corona management fails all along the line
It should now be clear to everyone that corona management is failing across the board. The hopelessly overwhelmed steamy talkers who try to gloss over their mistakes and omissions have long since been disenchanted – whether they come from the Union or from other parties that have governmental responsibility in the federal and state levels. Nobody should feel too sure that the mass for the Bundestag election has already been read.
Because the losers of the corona pandemic – and we are citizens and voters – can no longer be put off. They are simply fed up with broken promises – swift vaccinations, for example. Fortunately, radical parties are not yet benefiting from it, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
