This change of government should actually pass most people by relatively silently.
So not the first, in the Bundestag and Bellevue Palace.
There were push notifications and live reports, you could see camera professional Karl Lauterbach happily waving his certificate and the new Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir pedaling home with his on the luggage rack.
And of course you saw Olaf Scholz, who handed Angela Merkel a bouquet of flowers and then suddenly became Chancellor.
There is a protocol for this ceremony that is quickly explained: First the incumbent is adopted, then the new Chancellor is sworn in. Many now compare this assumption of office with that of Willy Brandt, because he too once wanted to make the Federal Republic younger, fresher and more modern. The motto of the new traffic light coalition “Dare to make more progress” is based on Brandt's promise: “Dare to be more democratic”. But Willy Brandt, it has to be said at this point, has not yet had an Instagram.
A second change of power took place here at the same time;
and anyone who took a look at the app on December 8th, around 3:30 p.m., might have had to pause for a moment.
For at least half an hour, the Federal Republic was ruled twice - and on equal terms - by @bundeskanzlerin and @bundeskanzler.
Both accounts were followed by the same 1.8 million people, some of whom might wonder why they suddenly greeted Olaf Scholz from their feed, as they once pressed "subscribe" to Merkel.
So, demand from Instagram, more precisely from Meta, as the Facebook group is now called.
How does it work to simply transfer followers to a new profile?
Sounds like every influencer's dream: from 80,000 followers to 1.8 million, and that in just a few minutes.
And that is what Olaf Scholz lives now?
On that day there were also others who handed over the account on social media with their office, for example government spokesman Steffen Seibert. He said goodbye in a Twitter archive profile, available at @RegSsprecherStS, and called on people to please follow his successor, Steffen Hebestreit, who will take over the @RegSsprecher handle in the future. “Unfortunately, the Twitter guidelines do not allow him to have the one million followers,” he apologized in a video message.
It was different with the change of government on Instagram, as a meta spokesman said on request. The profile of the Federal Chancellor has also been converted into an archive account, it will be preserved for posterity as @bundeskanzlerinmerkel. But previously it had been duplicated for the new profile of the Federal Chancellor. Still a novelty in this country, after all, the last change of office took place in 2005, five years before Instagram was founded. In the USA, however, Meta has already been able to accompany several changes of office; and the group had already organized the Instagram handovers for Obama, Trump and Biden. The followers thus automatically follow the profile of the new office holder, while that of the predecessor remains archived and can be called up. Whether you find it measured or service-oriented to assumethe followers of an incumbent would also be interested in his successor, remains a matter of opinion.
In the past few years, Angela Merkel has become less known as Instagram Chancellor and more so than that of discreet SMS messages.
Gerhard Schröder, who has probably been considered the number one influencer among the former chancellors, looked down on the goings on Wednesday from the box of the Bundestag.
Then a quick snapshot, uploaded by his wife @soyeonschroederkim: "Greetings from the Bundestag", in a nutshell.
Since then, Olaf Scholz has published ten posts and even more stories.
The race for the Chancellery is over for the time being, the Chancellor's Instagram is just getting started.