Fraktur: shell game with tanks and dolls

We haven't seen them for a long time, these friendly gentlemen, often near the train station, who would give us money if our eyes had been as quick as their fingers.

All we had to do was tell them which of the three nutshells or matchboxes the pellet was under, and we'd get double our stake back.

Bertolt Kohler

Editor.

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We were young and needed the money.

Unfortunately, however, the little globule turned up less and less where one had definitely expected it to, so that the financial transfer increasingly did not go in the direction that had been so convincingly promised to us.

Since then, we've understood that people beg for one euro at the train station because they don't have the money to go home.

Why do we remember the shell game now?

Because it is now being run at the highest level and on a grand scale.

The pellet - these are the tanks that we supposedly want to deliver to Ukraine.

The little boxes – these are the allegations of what happens or doesn't happen to these vintage cars for a wide variety of reasons (secrecy, fear of Putin's revenge, missing fine dust filters).

Where is that smurfy grin lurking?

Could you say with certainty which of the three nutshells the cheetahs are hiding under?

Under which box the martens?

And under which little lid lurks only the shell-player's smurfy grin that we can't forget?

It's already clear: the gun smuggling is primarily intended to confuse Putin.

He plays all or nothing in the Ukraine.

But in the meantime, even the federal government itself no longer seems to know exactly where the many bullets that it has brought into play are.

That this is a double thing, as opposition leader Merz said, is a flat understatement.

If only the Lord Mayor of Frankfurt, Feldmann, had said that!

Even in the ranks of the supposedly co-governing FDP, there is now talk of a "muddle".

The defensive committee chairman Strack-Zimmermann did not call the chancellor a shell swindler;

The mood in the coalition isn't that bad yet, and they wanted to cultivate a culture of respect.

But she thinks Scholz is a player: He "has the strings in his hand and can let the puppets dance accordingly".

The dolls?

dance?

Uiuiui, if the mayor of Frankfurt had said that!

Luckily he is hormonally incapacitated.

Strack-Zimmermann can only have meant the Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Interior and Defense.

All three belong to the Federal Security Council, which decides on arms deliveries to Ukraine.

These puppets also decided on the so-called ring exchange, which does not mean the move to Faeser's place and their deportation to Hesse, which Lambrecht longed for at least, but the delivery of German tanks to allies in the East so that they could then hand over even older tanks to the Ukraine be able.

This XXL version of the shell game seems to overwhelm the coalition.

Apparently Warsaw is on the verge

of declaring war on

We really do live in strange times.

The recourse to the ring exchange parable is also not happy for another reason.

The ring would only be closed if Kyiv ultimately delivered us very old weapons, such as muzzleloaders.

But the Ukrainians really need every shotgun themselves now. So it might be better to speak of an anonymous tank donation.

Scholz does not want to attract attention as a weapons supplier

Because the Scholz government wants one thing above all: not to attract attention as a weapons supplier, especially not in Moscow.

She prefers to accept the risk of being seen in the eyes of the world as a "complete brakeman and loser" (again Strack-Zimmermann), who knows neither how to organize nor how to communicate.

The SPD will certainly not like this criticism, which could well have come from the Ukrainian ambassador.

We ourselves expect protests because of the comparison between the federal government and the shell players.

The pros from the train station will definitely not let him down.