Less than a week after taking office, New Chancellor of GermanyOlaf Scholz is already reminding the rest of the world of his rare political talent: using such vague and formulaic answers to thwart reporters’ ability -matic” nickname.
The Social Democratic Party, Scholz, will form a “traffic light” coalition with the Green Party and the Liberal Democratic Party to govern. He will leave his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki on Sunday. He has no wise choice about the controversial plan. Beixi No. 2 Natural Gas Pipeline Poland has urged its western neighbors to abolish relations between Russia and Germany.
In a joint press conference with the Polish Chancellor, the ninth German Chancellor avoided this topic by looking to the future: in 25 years, “it’s not that far,” he said, Germany In any case, natural gas will no longer be used as an energy source.
The day before, after a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, when asked how the two European countries would react if Russia invaded Ukraine, and whether he was going to review Maastricht’s inflation standards, the French president used These questions were answered in nearly three minutes. At last.
At the same time, Schultz responded to three general statements: “One thing is very clear: we must cooperate, we must take action, and work towards this in Europe. But this requires our borders to remain strong, and we Efforts are being made to ease the conflict. We want to make sure that the future is open to everyone.”
When Schultz introduced his left-wing liberal government’s joint treaty earlier this month, he had already made foreign media aware of his iconic rhetoric.
A reporter from the Dutch “Telegraph” asks a question Comment on whether he is responsible for the matter Riots and robberies After the Hamburg G20 summit in 2017, when Scholz was mayor at the time, he completely ignored this issue and said: “We agreed in the alliance negotiations to make every effort to ensure that domestic security is guaranteed. The police will get all the support they need to ensure There will be no chance of crime in Germany.”
“This Schulzomat Back,” said Dagmar Rosenfeld, a reporter for Le Monde, who reviewed footage of Schultz’s first press conference on German television on Sunday night.
Nickname is Created by the weekly Die Zeit in 2003, When Scholz was the General Secretary of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the then Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, he tended to defend his party’s line by repeating the same phrases.
“The general secretaries quickly learned to express their answers in the most vague way, and delete the words’yes’ and’no’ from their vocabulary,” the first biography of the new prime minister, Olaf Shu Rath Haider in “Woltz: Road to Power” said. , Released this week.
In his book, the editor of Hamburger Abendblatt, the editor of the local newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, Heidel recalled how the politician later adjusted his strategy for dealing with the media. Sometimes the answers were so monosyllable that the interviewer had no questions at all.
However, the purpose remains the same. “Usually the question is not answered directly, just don’t give the interviewer the impression that they can determine the topic of the conversation,” Haider wrote.
Therefore, Schultz’s rhetoric habits are far from those of his predecessor Angela Merkel. Merkel’s speeches are often deliberately flat and formulaic to avoid accidental diplomatic disturbances.
“Every word a politician says must be said in a way that everyone can understand, even those who are not present,” Schultz told Haider in an interview. “You cannot rely on the context in which the sentence is expressed.”
This week the German media admitted that Scholz’s robotic approach may be more good than bad for his career. “But it does reveal a strange understanding of journalism,” said Marcus Fedenkirchen of Der Spiegel. “Especially the Prime Minister should aim for a higher goal.”
