The viral video that CHANGES EVERYTHING!!

Dear Reader,

Click-hungry journalists have been waiting for this election season’s “Laschet moment” - the point when a single gaffe leads to a dramatic turnaround in polling.

The phrase refers to the 2021 elections, when CDU leader Armin Laschet was well ahead in polling before a single, unguarded moment derailed his career.

On a visit to a region hit by a deadly flood, Laschet was photographed laughing with a member of his security entourage. The image was so incongruous with the devastation around him that it literally sank his election campaign.

In the coming weeks, the CDU plunged from 30 percent to 20 percent in polling. Olaf Scholz was glad to take the outraged centrist voters from him and sailed to victory.

In a way, it was cruel - despite the faux pas, Laschet seemed like a decent chap. In another way, it revealed him as a man who lacked the gravitas that comes with the job of being chancellor.

This time around, with the polls going nowhere fast, the press have been desperate to find a “Laschet moment” to give the election a bit of excitement.

The right-wing media claimed that a selfie snapped by a group of Green politicians at a “Demo gegen Rechts” days after the Aschaffenburg attack was their “Laschet moment.” But the photo was taken hundreds of kilometres from the site of the attack. Only die-hard Green-haters were outraged.

Then, Angela Merkel’s public admonishment of Friedrich Merz for his landmark decision to rely on AfD votes to pass an anti-migration resolution led to speculation that this could be his Laschet moment.

That didn’t happen either. As much as the move may have cost Merz support among centrists, it also seems to have attracted new voters to the CDU. At any rate, polls barely shifted.

Last week, there was more speculation of a Laschet moment when Scholz was reported to have called a dark-skinned CDU politician a “jester” at a private party. But that story also didn’t have the ingredients to go full Laschet. There was no image, no proof of the crime.

With just five days to go, some journalists are probably losing hope that they will ever have their Laschet moment. But I have news for them - it has arrived. They just didn’t see it because it was a reverse Laschet.