When vaccines or masks roll off an airplane, prime ministers and ministers can easily find their way to the airport.
When the last German soldiers returned from Afghanistan to their homeland, there was no politician standing on the tarmac.
No federal president, no federal chancellor, no defense minister, no foreign minister, no state secretary, no defense commissioner, no member of parliament, not even a district administrator.
Kramp-Karrenbauer was in Washington, and in other cases there was talk of scheduling conflicts.
From this one has to conclude: Everything else was more important than greeting the last of the 160,000 men and women who had been deployed in Afghanistan over the past twenty years.
59 of them did not come back alive.
The living as well as the dead deserved visible recognition and gratitude on this symbolic day, not just at a ceremony that is still to be held.
Why didn't at least a few MPs appear who otherwise always insist that the Bundeswehr is a “parliamentary army”?
More “friendly disinterest”, as Federal President Köhler once criticized, was not possible. Football players who missed the round of 16 can be treated like this - but not soldiers who gave their lives to fulfill the mandate of government and parliament. That was also, and especially, those who protected the trigger until the last minute: the men from the KSK.