When the alliance of SPD, Greens and FDP elected Olaf Scholz as Chancellor a year ago, the three parties thought they were in seventh heaven of politics: finally governing, finally shaping Germany - and the world - according to their ideas.
Just a few months later, they woke up in the limbo of a war they too had thought unthinkable.
Since then, the "traffic light" has been working in a state of emergency.
One of the few who hardly shows that the government is turning in the "red zone" (Habeck) is Scholz.
He follows the motto: calm and reassurance are the first duties of the chancellor.
His nature makes it easy for him to fulfill them.
It is considered newsworthy when the chancellor does not read out his government statement quite as monotonously as a notary public reads out a will, but contradicts the opposition leader, which can be interpreted as an indication of inner impulses.
Scholz also reveals this when he thinks his achievements and those of his government are not being recognized in the way he considers appropriate.
Then he praises her himself. However, to describe him as a self-promoter would be an exaggeration.
Media-effective productions are among the passions that he does not have.
Germany got the chancellor it ordered
After a year you can say: The Germans got the chancellor and leadership that they had ordered.
The newcomer should not be completely different from the chancellor, who for 16 years gave the impression that she was above things and that there was no crisis that could really shake her.
It was desired that after her departure not a hectic but a stoic of power would move into the chancellor's office.
Scholz therefore only needed to be himself during the election campaign to give the SPD the lead that made him chancellor.
He must lead Germany through the worst and most dangerous crisis since the first Cold War.
His turning point speech proved that he has the judgment and determination a head of government needs, especially when his party is the SPD.
However, the sluggish execution of the announcements not only raises doubts about the abilities of the defense minister, but also about the assertiveness of a chancellor, who had to refer to his policy competence just to end the nuclear bickering between the FDP and the Greens.
Admittedly, criticism of the mistakes made by the coalition in "Wummsen" seems to bother the chancellor just as little as his poor personal figures in the polls.
However, a government would have to be able to drop manna from heaven to be praised by the people in times like these.
Apparently not even the hundreds of billions that are being poured out across the country from traffic lights are not enough, as if nobody needed to pay them back.
The reputation of the Scholz government at home and abroad would have been even worse if there hadn't been another crash in the past twelve months: that of Angela Merkel.
The mom nostalgia expected by many did not materialize because Putin's attack on Ukraine also destroyed Merkel's reputation as the stateswoman who thinks everything from the end.
Nobody wanted to spend money on defense
It is nonsense to blame her for the fact that Germany became so dependent on a despot and at the same time let the Bundeswehr go to the dogs.
The German economy sucked on the oil and gas pipelines in the East like an addict sucking on an opium pipe.
But nobody wanted to spend money on defense.
Two of Merkel's three finance ministers belonged to the SPD, including Vice Chancellor Scholz.
The archives contain countless statements from the ranks of the SPD on defense policy, which should at least today make the comrades blush.
But all of this happened under the aegis of Chancellor Merkel, whose record is darkening as Germans now have to make sacrifices for the miscalculations and illusions of the past.
The Scholz government is making every effort to limit the suffering from the energy shortage, inflation and the other consequences of the war - by postponing as much of the loss of prosperity as possible into the future, which it wanted to make so bright.
Scholz calms the Germans on credit.
Not even Söder claims that
And he is comfortable with the fact that he only has to stand for re-election in three years, should the FDP not commit suicide beforehand by leaving the government for fear of creeping death.
As chancellor, Scholz wants to experience and shape even better times than the current misery, which of course also stabilizes his chancellorship.
Nobody has called for his resignation or even claimed that he would be the better chancellor in this situation, not even Markus Söder.