Election diary: Dec 16th-20th

Dear Reader,

This week, we witnessed an increasingly irritable Olaf Scholz, more unstable state coalitions, and a monstrous attack on a Christmas market.

Montag, 16th December

Olaf Scholz has often been accused of being too boring. But who can say that now?

Ever since his government collapsed in early November, the chancellor has switched from being as dry as a riesling to being as pugnacious as a home-distilled schnapps.

On Monday, he started the day with a speech in the Bundestag in which he accused his former finance minister Christian Lindner of having the mentality of a prepubescent boy. Lindner “lacked the moral maturity” to sit in a cabinet, Scholz said, claiming that he had “sabotaged” the government for weeks instead of looking out for the interests of the country’s 84 million inhabitants.

Scholz wasn’t done there. In a TV interview that evening he referred to Friedrich Merz as “Fritze Merz” and said that he “likes to talk nonsense.” The word he used for nonsense - Tünkram - is reg…