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Andreas Scheuer did not admit mistakes.

But the Federal Minister of Transport seemed to want to show a little consideration for dissatisfied people: "I understand the discontent with the project," said the CSU politician on Thursday afternoon in front of the door of the investigative committee.

Inside, during his interrogation, Scheuer also revealed his own unease in his long opening statement: "These developments do not leave me unaffected." But since Scheuer did not want to admit any mistakes with the car toll, this last witness interview remained in the one for a year Working body unclear what Scheuer's indications of problem awareness could refer to.

Especially since the somehow repentant-looking behavior did not last long: When the sun came through Berlin in the early afternoon and shone in the minister's face through the large windows of the conference room, he asked not to close the blinds.

Because, says Scheuer with a smile, “the sun is just rising for me”.

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And when the first critical questions came from the opposition representatives and from the SPD chairwoman Kirsten Lühmann, who, despite all loyalty to the coalition, was very thorough, Scheuer acted extremely self-confidently, interrupted the questioners for instructions and digressed to general descriptions of the financing of German road construction.

The FDP chairman Christian Jung sarcastically described this as “remarks on the history of ideas about the car toll”.

Scheuer's peculiar location

This made the minister's peculiar situation apparent.

On the one hand, he knows that he is responsible for a debacle that most citizens perceive as such: the German car toll was overturned by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in June 2019, and when the toll collection was assigned to a A consortium of companies Kapsch and Event at the end of 2018, according to the investigative committee's research, indicates that the ministry violated budgetary and public procurement law.

In addition, there is a risk that Scheuer's spontaneous termination of these toll contracts directly after the negative ECJ ruling could cost the federal government compensation payments of more than half a billion euros.

On the other hand, Scheuer is a self-confident CSU politician who is fully behind his party's toll project, who does not want to resign and to be re-elected to the Bundestag in the fall - and apparently thinks he has done nothing wrong with the project.

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In this contradictory situation between the recognition of a disaster and the insistence on absolute correctness, Scheuer used the technique of referring to others in addition to the stylistic device of initial contradiction signaling.

He spread extensively about the fact that the car toll was agreed in two coalition agreements - 2013 and 2017/18 - that the FDP and the Greens also accepted it during the Jamaica explorations at the end of 2017 and then approved the Bundestag and Bundesrat.

After taking office in March 2018, he only had to implement that, and the procedure for issuing the toll collection had already been started by his predecessor and party friend Alexander Dobrindt.

He emphasized several times that everything was a “process that was set up before my time”.

Scheuer pushes the blame aside

Scheuer also referred to others insofar as he repeatedly claimed in connection with the dubious processes during the award of the contract that close employees had assured him that all steps were safe.

For example, concerns about a possible breach of budgetary law were "not raised in response to my express question".

His State Secretary Gerhard Schulz, who was responsible at the time, also told him that everything would be unproblematic with regard to public procurement law.

But that wasn't the point of blame.

Because Scheuer took all his employees, including Schulz, under protection, described the officials in the ministry as "top-class" and rejected any suspicion that they might have been ready to "implement a major project without protection".

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There were also no deficits in the organizational structure of the ministry - which is why he did not have to interfere in many details.

This in turn meant that he was not responsible for the countless contradictions and inconsistencies in individual questions that had emerged in the committee because he was uninformed.

Thus, in the course of Scheuer's questioning, the impression arose that, in his opinion, no one and everyone was responsible for the toll debacle.

Scheuer seemed to feel more and more comfortable with this strategy in the course of the survey.

His appearance was becoming increasingly self-confident.

The left chairman Jörg Cezanne once asked him the very obvious question why the truck toll company Toll Collect was not privatized in autumn 2018, contrary to the original plan, but left in state ownership.

This question is important in the context of tolls because Toll Collect was then made a service provider for the Kapsch / Eventim consortium in a highly likely violation of public procurement law.

Therefore, the nationalization of Toll Collect could be motivated primarily by the car toll.

There was no longer any trace of Scheuer's humility

But when Cezanne asked about it, Scheuer replied leanly in an instructive tone that the nationalization of TollCollect was not part of the committee's investigation.

In response to questions from other MPs, the minister managed to search for possible political intentions behind the questions, asked counter-questions and gave imprecise comments on the specific subject.

There was then no trace of his initial humility at all.

And it became clear: Debacle or not - Scheuer's self-confidence had prevailed.

During a break after a four-hour questioning, the opposition MPs looked confused.

"I wonder how someone who bears political responsibility can act like this at this point," said the Greens' chairman Oliver Krischer.

Scheuers behavior is "hard to beat in hubris".

Kirsten Lühmann from the SPD was surprised that the minister had given the impression that “very little was informed about his lighthouse project”.

Scheuer's statement made it clear what Lühmann had already stated several times in the committee: namely that there was an “organized irresponsibility” in the ministry around tolls, where responsibility was repeatedly “passed on to the next lower level”.

As a result, however, the MPs found it very difficult to put Scheuer in distress.

And when a new sensitive point was reached, the minister withdrew to memory gaps.

Even then, when it came to the day of Scheuer's greatest defeat, the day of the ECJ judgment.

It would be interesting to know with whom Scheuer agreed at the time before he abruptly terminated the contracts and thus stopped the toll immediately, without considering a change to the German laws in accordance with European law.

So Scheuer was asked whether he had called Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the Bavarian Prime Minister and CSU leader Markus Söder that day.

Scheuer said that he “cannot remember”.