The envious looks of the nostalgic people downstream of the Danube are understandable: at Ballhausplatz in beautiful Vienna, at least one of their tribe still rules: a real Bavarian, someone who speaks the East-Central Bavarian dialect and was baptized as a Catholic. And what do you have in the white sausage metropolis? A non-Bavarian from Middle Franconia who couldn’t order a single Oktoberfest beer without a phonetic accident, let alone drink it or even tolerate it. Worse still: a Protestant, an evangelical one. For them, it’s as if the late Franz Beckenbauer from Munich-Giesing secretly slept in Borussia Dortmund fan bed linen throughout his life. And who’s called Markus? People are called Peppi, Maxl, Xaverl – or Koarli.
But Söder now shoots the bird with his outing in the Franconian carnival. The man who already appeared as Marylin Monroe this time plays Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Upper Prussian from Berlin, whose perhaps greatest achievement was that he had no interest in Austria in his plans for a German confederation. Söder comes with a wreath of gray hair and a sea lion mustache and in a parade uniform from the imperial times of glory and glory.
And is immediately under pressure to justify himself: after all, Bismarck was a great statesman. And much more important: “In an emergency, Bavaria must be the last Prussians…” CSU father Franz-Josef Strauss had already said. The emergency in Germany has long been present, and Strauss was, after all, a true Upper Bavarian. The Franconian Preiß will at least be able to dream of becoming chancellor in faraway Berlin during carnival…