TV column "Markus Lanz" - In the ZDF talk show it becomes abundantly clear what SPD man Steinbrück thinks about the Chancellor

TV column "Markus Lanz" - In the ZDF talk show it becomes abundantly clear what SPD man Steinbrück thinks about the Chancellor FOCUS-online author Axel Wolfsgruber • 37 million • 3 minutes reading time Ex-SPD candidate for Chancellor Peer Steinbrück discusses with moderator Markus Lanz. Chancellor Olaf Scholz still can't shake the discussion about his candidacy for Chancellor. In the ZDF talk show, SPD man Peer Steinbrück doesn't have a good word to say about him. He gives Scholz's Ukraine policy a verbal middle finger. "He thinks he's the one who can do it best," says Peer Steinbrück, smiling through his glasses. The man is an SPD politician and was once Federal Finance Minister in a black-red government under Angela Merkel. When moderator Markus Lanz asked his guest Steinbrück to give a more detailed assessment of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the now 77-year-old said: "I'm not going to give my party's candidate for chancellor any grades here." He didn't want to risk being expelled from the party. The record of the inventor of "If only, if only, bicycle chain" and the first publicly extended middle finger by a high-ranking politician could not have been worse. It is becoming abundantly clear how little Steinbrück believes in Scholz, the candidate for chancellor. Steinbrück criticizes SPD leadership Per Steinbrück believes that the disaster surrounding the SPD's candidate for chancellor for the election on February 23rd was primarily due to a team of advisors around Scholz. The "window of November 6th was not used." The SPD should have announced its candidate for chancellor on the day the traffic light broke. With tears in his eyes and his shirt collar open, Steinbrück explains: "The mistake is that the party leadership did not put an end to the chaos earlier." A change of personnel at the top of the party would have required a "Scholz who is the Joe Biden, and a Boris Pistorius who is the Kamala Harris." The SPD should have provided clarity on that day. "Mismanagement by the SPD" At the latest when Olaf Scholz publicly declared in clear terms that he considered himself to be his party's natural candidate for chancellor, there was no longer any political space for Defense Minister Pistorius, who is exceptionally popular according to polls. What an internally torn picture the SPD would have presented in the internal election campaign, Steinbrück asks rhetorically. Here an incumbent chancellor who does not want to let go, and there a candidate for chancellor who wants to succeed Scholz and may even attack him. "That was mismanagement by the SPD," says Steinbrück. "Scholz has not personally come to the conclusion that he will not be re-elected." Nobody is holding up a mirror to Scholz The fact is that the advisors in the SPD - above all the party leaders Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil - do not have the competence to hold up a mirror to the incumbent Chancellor. Peer Steinbrück explains smugly: "If you want to hold up a mirror to the emperor, you need a fast horse." Olaf Scholz obviously lacks the self-awareness that he has not managed to keep the show together - in what are certainly difficult times. The successful manager Martin Richenhagen is also in Markus Lanz's round and simply says: "Scholz lacks any self-awareness. He must have noticed that he cannot do it." And what makes matters worse: Scholz did not spread any confidence, did not move forward, remained vague and hesitant. Chancellor characteristics like these do not bring much momentum to the economy and society in times of crisis. In politics, this kind of psychology by no means plays a minor role. But there is a far more dangerous problem. "You don't spread fear" Olaf Scholz is going into the election campaign with the theory that the Union's candidate, Friedrich Merz, wants to give the nuclear power Russia an ultimatum in the Ukraine war and thus possibly provoke a war. In this way, the Chancellor creates the impression that there is peace with him and war with Merz. Firstly, this is factually incorrect because Putin has long been waging war in Germany in a hybrid way, and the options of war or peace are not applicable in this absolute sense anyway. Secondly, Scholz is deliberately stoking the fear of voters. It can't be a coincidence that Scholz is currently portraying himself as a peace moderator by first talking to Putin on the phone and then traveling to Kiev. Steinbrück says: "I think playing with fear is completely wrong because it leads to doing nothing at all. As the leader of a country, you don't spread fear." That is probably the verbal middle finger to the Chancellor.