Recently, in a panel discussion on Bavarian television, the top Bavarian politicians present were asked how they would describe their politics in the state election year of 2023.

Hubert Aiwanger, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Free Voters, said: "Politics with common sense." Opinions differ on what is meant by this - Aiwanger in particular is often denied common sense, especially on social media.

This is also due to the fact that it is precisely there that he offers the most reason for it.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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It all started with his strong push for state subsidies for snow guns - a debate that is not easy to win.

Remember the pictures from the Beijing Winter Olympics.

In Germany, people shook their heads at white bands in an otherwise snowless landscape.

The same thing happened in the Alps until recently.

Aiwanger has arguments for snowmaking on the slopes that are also shared by others.

"If we don't make snow, the tourists just go to Austria.

Then we don't earn any money, and the environment is certainly not served," he says of the FAZ

Aiwanger, however, weakens his own position by making valid concerns absurd.

When he was recently asked on Deutschlandfunk whether he thought skiing was the sport of the future, Aiwanger said: "We don't know whether people will still be skiing in a hundred years.

Maybe a meteorite will hit our dear earth by then.” But at the moment there are just enough frosty days to make snow.

"We can't shoot ourselves beforehand for fear of dying."

"Hello Green, did you hear that?"

When natural snow fell from the sky again after weeks of mild winter, Aiwanger wrote to his favorite opponents on Twitter: “Hello Greens, did you notice that Petrus switched the snow cannon on again?

According to your ideology, natural snow no longer exists.

Skiing is also currently possible again, 14 days ago you saw it as an outdated sport.”

His reasoning about the speed limit is similar.

In the round on Bavarian television, the Greens parliamentary group leader Ludwig Hartmann said that all of Europe has a speed limit that works.

Amid laughter from the audience, Aiwanger replied: "And isn't it getting warmer there?" He told the FAZ that that was of course a flippant answer, but it exposed the "monocausal thinking of the Greens".

Aiwanger does not accept that a study by the Federal Environment Agency showed that a speed limit of 120 on motorways could save around 6.7 million tons of CO2 per year and thus more than previously assumed by the authority: "They pay for it, like you need it.” A speed limit is noticeable in climate change “perhaps in the fifth place after the decimal point”.

"I'm not saying that the climate isn't changing,"

says Aiwanger.

“But it's naïve to think that we can change that by driving a little more slowly.

We need alternatives like hydrogen, but the Greens don't want to hear that because they're really going against the car itself.”