We should be grateful to Habeck

The Vice-Chancellor is furious, the coalition partners are losing trust in each other. The traffic light is currently not giving a good picture. But her greatest danger is yet to come.

trust is good trust can carry. When someone says to one of us: I trust you, a good feeling sets in. That’s how people can be with each other, it’s nice to treat each other like that.

Now you know from real life that it is quite difficult to have and get trust in the long term. As beautiful as it is, it rarely lasts long. Questions arise – what is this supposed to mean now, a different tone was agreed. A wrong stroke of the tongue, perhaps accidentally, can be massively irritating and creates an imbalance in the relationship.

Politics is competition. In politics, there is rarely a basis for trusting one another. Hardly anyone believed that the unity that prevailed at the beginning of the three-party coalition would endure forever. We know from life that threesome constellations have their pitfalls. Either two agree and the third feels left out, or each of the three does his own thing – and so there is no longer a whole.

Basically, we should be grateful to Robert Habeck for his prime-time outburst. He only said what everyone could see: Trust has been lost. Distrust is sown. But distrust decomposes, digs into the soul. Once it expands, the bulkheads come down and everyone thinks only of survival. The existentially threatened FDP thinks of its clientele, the Greens despair of the joint project and the SPD seems absent-minded.

The chancellor has to hold the whole thing together, who else. How he takes care of it, loudly or quietly, with a word of authority or by virtue of his official authority, depends on his mentality. Olaf Scholz sometimes seems uninvolved, which can be a strength because he first watches the others dance before intervening. But it can also be a weakness if he stays passive for too long, which he tends to do. Of course, the chancellor can’t keep banging in between, but he should show where the hammer is. But where is he hanging?

It’s hanging somewhere else now. Today’s nationwide strike may be just the beginning of conditions that may not necessarily turn out to be like in France, but the government undoubtedly has a problem – one more besides all the others. And there’s another sign on another wall that the coalition should read. The Berliners wrote it twice in quick succession: first they voted out their three-party alliance due to a lack of competence, and on Sunday they rejected the referendum for accelerated climate protection. Both were a surprise in this heated, experimental biotope.

Maybe something is turning, maybe something is changing in the country. Messrs. Scholz, Lindner and Habeck would do well to pay attention to these signs. It is possible that voters and citizens have experienced enough unreasonable demands in recent years, from the pandemic to the consequences of the Ukraine war and climate change. A number of Olaf Scholz’s predecessors, for example Helmut Schmidt with his own party or Helmut Kohl in the wake of reunification, had to experience the fact that unreasonable demands are finite. Each of them had to realize that over-politicization works to their disadvantage.

If trust within the coalition is depleted, how are voters, especially those who did not elect this government, build the confidence that climate change will be tackled at the right pace, with the right options? Loss of trust there is reciprocated with loss of trust here. That is understandable from a human point of view and only logical from a political point of view. And it is fatal for the ecological transformation of society.