GGermany’s next coalition government will be sworn in on Wednesday, and there will be a group of new faces, a new set of policy priorities and new vitality. It also speaks with a unique accent.
Olaf Scholz is a center-left politician who will succeed Angela Merkel. He is a native of northern Germany, not only in his upbringing, but also in his voice.When the former mayor of Hamburg recently warned in Parliament that Covid-19 has not been defeated, he tended to use the elongated fricative typical of Germany’s second largest city: the word Scholz pronounced Defeated As view.
His cabinet meeting will be more likely to start with casual murmurs Good morning Compare goodbye A greeting unique to the southern states. In Scholz’s Chief of Staff Wolfgang Schmidt (also from Hamburg), Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck (Plön from Schleswig Holstein), Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock and Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil (all from Lower Saxony), the main voices around the table From the northern third of the country.
In Germany’s decentralized political system, regional representation is crucial, and the government strives to get each of the 16 federal states to get its due share in Berlin’s power seat.
But under Schultz’s leadership, the shift in balance has been obvious. First, his cabinet will be the first cabinet without a Bavarian minister in the country’s post-war history. Germany’s largest and southernmost state eventually “sit on the bench,” the Secretary General of the Christian Social League in Bavaria complained this week.
In many respects, the northward shift of German political power is counterintuitive. The South dominates the economy: Compared with the North, the South has most of the large companies registered on the German Stock Exchange, provides homes for more start-ups, hires more IT professionals, and registers more patents. It occupies a supreme position in German football. Traditional northern clubs such as Werder Bremen and Hamburg SV have fallen into decline, while Bayern Munich has won one trophy after another.
But politically, since parliamentary seats moved from Bonn in the Rhineland to Berlin, the center of gravity has been quietly shifting north. After Merkel, who was born in Hamburg and grew up in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, and Hanoverian Gerhard Schroeder, Schultz became the third consecutive prime minister of the North. The last four representatives are from the northern states.
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Who are the members of the new German cabinet
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Principal: Olaf Schultz (Social Democratic Party)
The 63-year-old former mayor of Hamburg, a northern port city, served as finance minister under Angela Merkel, part of a “grand alliance” between his Social Democratic Party and her conservatives.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he designed a multi-billion-euro rescue plan for the economy.
He said that his first visit abroad as prime minister will be France, which is a recognition of the importance of the Franco-German alliance in reforming the Eurozone and strengthening the European Union.
Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Economy, Climate Protection, Digital Transformation and Energy Transition: Robert Harbeck (Green vegetables)
The 52-year-old co-leader of the Environmental Protection Party will lead a strengthened department responsible for overseeing the allocation of financial lifelines to companies affected by the lockdown and implementing a strategy to develop large-scale green hydrogen. In the future, it will also be responsible for solving the climate problem of the Green Party.
Finance: Christian Lindner (Liberal Democratic Party)
The 42-year-old free and fiscally conservative FDP leader stated that he will strictly limit new public borrowing and will not raise taxes to fund ambitious investments to get rid of the fossil fuel economy and upgrade Germany’s digital age infrastructure .
He supports the euro zone’s austerity policies and strict budget rules, which may put him in conflict with his counterparts in southern EU countries such as Italy and Spain.
Foreign Affairs: Annalena Baerbock (Green vegetables)
Belbok, 40, will become Germany’s first female foreign minister. The green party’s co-leader will have to strike a balance between her party’s demand for a tougher line on human rights in Russia and China and Schultz’s likely tendency not to risk conflicts with the two countries on issues such as Taiwan and Ukraine. .
Defense: Christine Lambrecht (Social Democratic Party)
Lambrecht, 56 years old, currently serves as Minister of Justice. She will become the third after the current Minister Annegrett Kramp-Karenbauer and the current European Commission President Ursula von der Lein Female Minister of Defense.
Lambrecht, who has always spoken out against right-wing extremism, will be in charge of the German army, which has been plagued by a series of reports about militants in his ranks in recent years.
Health: Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party)
The 58-year-old doctor has been trained as a doctor and has been outspoken in support of stricter coronavirus restrictions throughout the pandemic and will become the next Minister of Health.
Lauterbach, who studies epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, has always advocated mandatory vaccination, stricter restrictions on people who have not been vaccinated, and closure of all bars and clubs before the fourth wave of infections is over. Reuters
To some extent, the power of the North is the result of the weakness of the South and Southwest, where the Conservative Party group is particularly prone to infighting. If the Christian Democratic Union overcomes its complicated relationship with the Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, the Bundestag is likely to see the leader of the CSU, Markus Söder, sworn in as prime minister on Wednesday.
Tom Mannewitz, a political scientist at the Federal University of Public Administration, said: “With the deterioration of factionalism within the party and the historic split between the CDU and CSU, the conservative group is in the middle of southern Germany. Strategic disadvantage.”
Even so, accent still plays a surprisingly important role in German politics. Although Scholz’s speech still showed a unique northern mark, it was a far cry from the strong Hamburg dialect of his idol Helmut Schmidt.Like Merkel and Schroeder, most Germans might think that his accent is a standard German accent or Standard German, Gave him a quality of ordinary people, which is a quality that politicians who distinguish between the “high” and “low” dialects of German from the south of the so-called Uerdingen Line are difficult to achieve.
Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, said: “We are seeing more and more that high German-speaking politicians in northern Germany have gained more Recognition.” “In contrast, southern politicians often find it difficult to get rid of the atmosphere of regionalism.”
The last two contenders who failed to run for the top positions, the 2017 Social Democrats Martin Schultz and Merkel’s successor Amin Rashet, appointed in the September elections of this year, are both from Aachen, near Bonn. The old power center of the Republic, and it sounds like that when they speak.
Their approachable appeal, favor at the state level or in the European Parliament, becomes a burden when they try to break into the national arena, evoking the stereotype of the joyous but not serious carnival clowns: Raschelt’s ratings After he was photographed laughing in a joke, he fell sharply in a tragic incident that occurred in a small town hit by summer flash floods.
Michael Elmentaler, professor of linguistics at Keele University, said: “After World War II, a series of powerful German leaders emerged whose local accent was accepted as part of their identity. · Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard to Kurt Kiesinger and Helmut Kohl.
“However, what we are seeing now is that tolerance for local dialects is waning. If German politicians speak like Adenauer today, people will laugh at him.”
Linguists like Elmentaler have described the disappearance of local dialects, not only in the German National Assembly, but also in city halls and television networks, where the language of news anchors has become more casual but also more standardized. Language quirks associated with a particular city or town have given way to a broader “regional language”.
If Schultz’s northern status helped him obtain the post of prime minister, would this also affect his management of the country?
“A certain type of northern German politician has a powerful cliché, Hansa,” Said Christoph Stroop, a historian at the Hamburg Center for Contemporary History Research. “They should be sober pragmatists, humble in public, have independent ideas suitable for city-states, and have a knack for seeking compromise. “
Stroop said that although large countries like North Rhine-Westphalia have different centers of power, their interests can hardly be reconciled by a politician, but in Hamburg, “politics, business, and the media are closely related. Contact can make it easier to reach a consensus”.
“Scholz definitely fits many Hanseatic platitudes,” Strupp said-both negatively and positively. “He proved that he has the ability to form a red-green alliance with no shortage of conflicts. He managed to find decisive and feasible solutions to the deteriorating problems in the city, such as the over-budgeted Elbe Philharmonic Hall or housing shortages. .”
Hamburg City Hall is adjacent to the city’s chamber of commerce, and there is a sky bridge connecting the two buildings-some say it is a symbol of the closeness between political and commercial interests, creating a culture of behind-the-scenes trading. When he ran for the mayor of Hamburg in 2011, Schultz only recruited the chairman of the chamber of commerce as his business senator—and won.
