Skat is played by three people, usually one against two.

Whoever has good cards can impose his game on the other two.

For those who don't have such a good hand, it can be helpful if they put their card last, sitting in the back, as the skat players say.

This is how he can react to the others.

It can be similar in the fight between three candidates for chancellor.

On Tuesday, Armin Laschet sat in the back.

Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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The Bundestag met for the last session of the legislative period to talk about the situation in Germany for three hours.

That was an invitation to turn parliament into an election arena two and a half weeks before the general election.

And nobody turned them down.

The attempt by the opposition parties, the FDP and the Greens, to force the House to deal with the issue of the withdrawal from Afghanistan through a debate on the rules of procedure before the general debate failed due to the resistance of the coalition factions.

Merkel attests to a good performance

Michael Grosse-Brömer, Parliamentary Managing Director of the Union parliamentary group, set the tone for what came next in this preliminary discussion. A debate on Afghanistan is not necessary. The Greens would do much better to announce that after the election they would not form a coalition with a party that did not even agree to the legal basis for the evacuation operation at the end of the Afghanistan mission. There it was, the Union's accusation that the Greens and the SPD wanted to form a government with the Left Party.

The Chancellor candidate of the Greens, Annalena Baerbock, and the applicant of the SPD, Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, belong to the Bundestag anyway. Union candidate Laschet, as Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, has the right to attend and speak at the meetings. No wonder he made use of it on Tuesday. But before it came to those who want to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, she spoke herself.

At first she certified herself in a good performance.

As she has been doing in recent times, she reminded them that in the fight against climate change, not only had CO2 pricing been introduced, but that there are now a million electric cars on Germany's roads.

The number of unemployed fell from five million to half during her tenure.

Much has also been achieved in terms of digitization, with the federal government in particular now offering administrative services online.

There are "small difficulties that can be identified", but by and large progress has been made.

The Union sinks below 20 percent

Then Merkel turned the rhetorical guns on the SPD. She praised the success of the corona vaccinations and said that nobody was a "guinea pig". Scholz recently chose this expression. Merkel called for people to get vaccinated. One has to convince of this with arguments and not with "crooked pictures of guinea pigs".

Then Merkel spoke directly about the election. It does not matter who will rule Germany in the future, an alliance made up of the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party or a government with moderation and moderation under a Chancellor Armin Laschet. When it got restless in the hall, Merkel said: "I'm only telling the truth!" . The Union faction got up for the first time that day to applaud vigorously.

Some may have expressed their relief that Merkel has recently interfered more than before in the election campaign and is fighting for Laschet. After all, time is running out, as Union politicians emphasize again and again. The survey institute Insa saw the Union parties on Monday half a percentage point better than the last measured 20 percent, but the value for the SPD rose by a whole point to 26. And Forsa published a survey on behalf of RTL that only opened 19 percent comes for the Union.