The first question is programmatic. “Lie down or get up?” Olaf Scholz is asked by Brigitte Huber, editor-in-chief of the women's magazine Brigitte. And since Scholz, the somewhat relegated candidate for Chancellor of the SPD, can of course say nothing other than "get up", even if he then explains in great detail that he actually prefers to lie down. In the morning in bed, of course. Scholz is the third candidate for Chancellor to be a guest at “Brigitte Live”, a format that aims to show “the people behind the election program”. Before Scholz, Huber and their colleague Meike Dinklage step onto the stage of the “Astor Filmpalast” on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, an excerpt from earlier interviews with Angela Merkel is shown on the screen. "Are you vain?" Is the question to the Chancellor, who says soberly as usual,she felt better now that her hair was no longer blasphemed. So that's the context. You can tell that Scholz has prepared well. (Then, later, it will also be about his hair, which he says he should have shaved off much earlier.)

Anna Vollmer

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

In a way, it is fitting that the SPD's candidate for chancellor appears here a few weeks after his competitors, about whom there is currently so much talk, but hardly about him.

At least not negative, Scholz could be credited with.

Conspicuous in being inconspicuous, shining through the mistakes of others.

Part of Scholz's appearance that evening is not to exploit these mistakes, and only very rarely to speak badly about his competitors.

Only once, when it comes to climate policy, does Scholz become very clear: There is Laschet, the Union is “on the wrong side”.

That was it already.

If criticism, then subtle: Talking long and in detail about various offices and his professional experience as a lawyer, what all of this taught him.

And silently indicate what he has ahead of his competitor.

The calm itself

In a comment on the Brigitte appearance of the Green candidate a few weeks ago, it was said that Baerbock lacked the Teflon. Whether that is a deficit remains to be seen, at least Olaf Scholz is not lacking. You actually believe that he is, as he says, "at rest" while he is sitting there completely relaxed, alternately looking at his interviewers and looking at the empty, dark room in which a few isolated journalists are taking notes. Scholz knows where you can be private without getting caught, when you should turn the private into the political and successfully iron out the really political. He chooses the former between “body or soul” (“so we can have a lot of fun”), and then report on his transformation from unsportsmanlike youngsters to athletic candidates for chancellor. He likes to go jogging, but notto roll over problems, and even without measuring devices - so no neoliberal success junkie, a social democrat jogs for the sake of jogging. Or, to come back to his first, philosophical answer to the question: for the unity of body and mind.

When asked about his early, somewhat more left-wing years (“What would your twenty-year-old self think of you today?”), He replies a dry “Well” - only to explain afterwards that the advantage of changing opinions in different phases of life is more tolerant of them To become opinions of others. Which, especially in these days, is a sentence that most people can agree on. Also on the topic of the day, the cum-ex judgment, which affects him not insignificantly, he has a couple of completely consensual sentences ready for the admittedly absolutely uncritical questions. It is a “great day”, he has “a clear conscience”.

How confidently Scholz manages this mixture of routine (the obligatory social-democratic reference to “the hard-working self-employed, the little craftsman”) and spontaneous reaction to the questions put to him is particularly noticeable in one situation. If Annalena Baerbock had answered the inappropriately gender-specific question of what she would change in her body, she was still well-behaved (she would like to be taller), Scholz does not allow herself to be involved in clichés of this kind. And when Meike Dinklage asks whether his wife will continue to work should he become Federal Chancellor, she simply says: "My wife is a successful politician and is now a minister in a second federal state." but she still doesn't seem to be aware of this question, that's not enough, she asks again:"Called? Continue working? ”To which Scholz can then say that this question“ outrags ”him because a woman would of course never be asked it. Dinklage now feels clearly caught, laughs nervously and comes back to it at the end of the interview: That was "the dumbest question" she had asked for months, and it was great how Scholz had reacted to it. It can sometimes be that easy to get points.It can sometimes be that easy to get points.It can sometimes be that easy to get points.