Today we want to spoil the matter right away and therefore reveal the crazy sentence Maybrit Illner ended her program with "Citizens ask Olaf Scholz, but the Chancellor does not answer" (or something similar).

The Maybrit-Illner bouncer music had already started when the presenter raised her voice and said: "And we agree here at the table that we live in dramatic times and that there is still a lot to do in many, many corners." In earnest.

Those were her words, if not to say her conclusion.

Olaf Scholz couldn't have put it better either.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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Although… basically he had said it a long time ago, the Federal Chancellor, only more tortuously, more cloudily.

Let's take one of his new favorite words.

No, not the "under the hook", the incantation dusted with social democratic nostalgia of a solidarity in Germany that is by no means a matter of course.

He actually spoke of the "under hook" once, and Maybrit Illner, who had heard the word from Scholz before, even aped it a bit.

But Scholz spoke much more often of the "shortage", which means the fears that concern so many people in the country: having nothing left to heat.

Freeze at Christmas.

Price increases, inflation, big crisis.

However: If the fall into poverty resembles a tiger, the "shortage" is a domestic cat.

On the one hand, Scholz said of this condition, the shortage, that it was not certain that it would come to her at all.

"That's why we made laws that allow us to act as a state.

Every day we prepare with great intensity for such a situation to arise.” A small interim question: Shouldn't he rather

prevent

such a situation from arising with great intensity?

"The shortage does not occur," said Scholz, "that everyone says, now finally say, it's here!

It's there when it's there.” All right?

A little later, when the moaning and whining of the citizens in the studio became too much for him without losing his smile, Scholz said this: "You shouldn't pretend that there is a button that you have to press , and then everything is fine.

It's not like that.

And that's why I say: We have to prepare for it.

And we are the country that has already made most of the decisions in case of a shortage and started to think through exactly these questions as early as December last year.

That's why we're very, very far along with the preparatory measures.

But we must not pretend that the situation is already there;

it can only happen to us, and that's a serious risk, and that's why we're right to talk about it here, and that's why it shouldn't be denied.

it

can

happen;

but it doesn't have to."

Designs without contour or rigidity

At some point someone will come along and decipher the rhetorical trick that allows Olaf Scholz to exude a sense-like aura in individual components of his statements, while the overall thing of his speech, viewed in the light, is more of a big hum with carefully dosed sprinklings of sense simulation.

In any case, hardly anything about it has contour or solidity, doesn't fill you up, doesn't lead you any further.

You listen, you might think you have understood something, you want to grab it with your hands or, if necessary, with your mouth, but flutter!

– the sense is gone again.

You look on the ground to see if something might have fallen, but there's no point lying around there either.

As the old saying goes, you can't nail a soft cheese to the wall, no matter how hard you hammer.