With one leg, Merz is already in the Chancellery

Exchange roles in the TV duel
With one leg, Merz is already in the Chancellery

The incumbent makes the biting attacker, the challenger gives the quiet statesman. The TV duel makes it clear: the Chancellor has no office bonus, but the traffic light.

The roles in this TV duel was strange: the Chancellor attacked the challenger much more than the other way around. On Sunday evening, Olaf Scholz clearly tried two things: to get out of the defensive with snappy attacks, to give themselves in a leadership. And provoking the Union's candidate for chancellors to a mistake.

One succeeded, the other was not. Scholz was surprisingly alive in the 90 minutes. However, his provocations stood up to be in vain: Friedrich Merz was not carried away to any careless statement that his team would have had to laboriously capture later.

Scholz left nothing to be unnecessary. He threw Merz's broken word and taboo because he wanted to have a draft bill in the Bundestag decided with the votes of the AfD. He assumed that Merz could no longer be believed if the said that he would never be chosen as a chancellor using the AfD. He indirectly called Merz “stupid” because his influx limitation law breaks European law, where the federal government had just established a European regulation. He accused Merz of having a “speech bubble” separately. He called Merz 'explanations about the financing of armaments spending “ridiculous”.

Merz didn't go into the trap

The SPD strategists have been spreading for months that Merz has been to beat in the election campaign because he is arrogant and uncontrolled and therefore made mistakes. In his government declaration in the Bundestag, Scholz had accused Merz that he had terminated the “basic consensus of our republic in the affect” when he did a “common cause” with the AfD. In affect, that was important to him. It is the narrative of the too impulsive politician who does not have a grip on.

But Merz did not go into the trap, but appeared, as if he was already standing in the Chancellery with one leg. He accused Scholz not to live in “not in this world” and to say “the reality out there”. But that's it.

However, Merz was not as instructive as you have already experienced on another occasion. In a situation, when Scholz had almost argued the CDU chief into the narrow, Merz simply let the criticism be dismantled. Scholz has a point when he says that it is not good to change the increasing costs for defense policy, for arms deliveries to Ukraine and also for the Ukrainian refugees to “the normal people”. This takes care of social strife. That is why Scholz wants a reform of the debt brake.

Merz, on the other hand, remained very vague on this topic. He spoke of setting “priorities in the household”, of growth and savings potential. Scholz's accusation that Merz presses his own proposal was therefore not quite dismissed. Merz countered him anyway: Scholz and the SPD would only come up with new debts and higher taxes. “This is the pattern that we always see with you.” Regardless of whether the accusation applies or not: the sentence should have got caught in quite a few spectators.

All mistakes of the traffic lights go home with Scholz

The reason for the unusual distribution of roles between incumbent and challenger is obvious: Merz leads in the surveys, Scholz is cut. Stand now the SPD has to hope to come to third place. Scholz can be happy that ARD and ZDF did not orientate itself to the surveys when they prepared the common broadcast: In the recent surveys, the SPD has 15 or 16 percent, the Union, on the other hand, to 28 to 31 percent. The Greens are approximately 14 or 15 percent, the AfD, on the other hand, is significantly stronger than the Social Democrats at 20 to 21 percent.

The election campaign for the Union was far from over, on the contrary: Merz has to prevent the feeling of spreading among the supporters of the Union that victory is practically safe. But his situation is much more comfortable than Scholz's. The Chancellor has tostrture, he has to turn the election campaign. The devastating picture that most Germans have from his federal government is adhering to him. All mistakes, all failures go home with him in the end. Any plan that Scholz now announces, whether in migration or economic policy, can be countered with an obvious accusation: Why haven't they implemented it long ago? The Chancellor does not have an office bonus, but the traffic light disadvantage.

In view of this starting point, Merz's personal poll values ​​are surprisingly bad. But it is crucial that the Union can hope to become twice as strong as the SPD and also the Greens. Merz 'motto for the TV duel should have been: just don't make mistakes. He did that.