The new year has not started well for Green boss Robert Habeck: First the data theft, which concerned him and his family, then the Twitter video, with which he triggered a shitstorm. "We try to do everything to make Thuringia an open, free, liberal, democratic country," he said in the campaign ad.
Does Habeck Thüringen say that it is going there democratically? In addition, govern in the country so even his Greens.
It is not the first time that he indirectly implies that one state does not fulfill the requirements of the Basic Law. During the Bavarian election campaign, he uploaded a video in which he said: "Finally, finally there is democracy in Bavaria again, an autocracy will be ended".
Two states, the identical mistake.
Now he reacts to the criticism of the video with self-reproaches. "How stupid do you have to be to make a mistake twice?" he writes in a blog entry on his website. The question had not let him go all night. How on earth could anything happen to him, he writes.
He gives the Bayerischer Rundfunk an interview in the morning. He bites his ass, he says. It was just stupid, he adds later, in Frankfurt on the Oder, where the Greens leadership is on retreat.
And Habeck draws a radical consequence. He forbids tweeting. Because Twitter makes him more aggressive, louder, more polemical and sharpened. He caught himself, as he greets after talk shows or party congresses, as the Twitter world has found him.
After a sleepless night, I come to the conclusion that Twitter rubs off on me. That must have consequences. And mine is that I delete my account.
https://t.co/4DkwpQeXew
Public self-flagellation can not go much farther.
Is not that too much of a good thing? A little theatrical? Without question, it's an embarrassing mistake that he made. Because this spell cements the image of the party as a know-it-all, rather than break it up - which the Greens have set out to do, especially for this year's state elections in the East.
Habeck, of course, is first of all about mitigation of damage, including the salvation of his reputation. After all, he's just written a book about language, about how it affects politics. "The language of left politics, too, is far from being sober and balanced, it is often patronizing and sometimes exclusionary," he aptly writes.
Three mistakes
His explanation: He had promised himself. Instead of "staying" he said in the video "will". In fact, he would have said: "We are trying to do everything so that Thuringia remains an open, free, liberal, democratic country" - no one would have been upset.
The video was made weeks ago on the sidelines of the congress in Leipzig, he had previously synonymous similar videos for the Greens in Brandenburg and Saxony, three to six times, he explains. It seems like the video just slipped through.
But uploading the video is not the only mistake. The reaction of the Thuringian Greens to the criticism seems at least questionable: the national association put out the video. Many had misunderstood Habeck, so it was taken out of the network, so the reasoning. The problem: There is nothing in this video that could be misunderstood. Not to admit that, not to apologize, that was the second mistake.
If you ask them, the Greens say they are not talking publicly about internals. Whether the national association has discussed before the publication again with the federal office, remains open.
Habeck's partial withdrawal from social media - Instagram he remains so far - could harm the Greens in the election campaign, the party leader had after all had close to 50,000 followers on Twitter. Is this the future abstinence of Habeck's perhaps the third mistake in this Causa?
Habeck justifies his departure from Facebook meanwhile as follows: Because "the data theft" personal conversations between his family and him "on all computers of the German daily newspapers and a lot of right-wing media" have brought, he also delete his Facebook presence.
By the end of 2018 personal data and partly private communication had been published via Twitter by politicians, journalists and celebrities. The data theft had become public only in early January, were affected politicians of almost all parties, only the right-wing populist AfD was apparently not in the sights of illegal action.