2024-09-19 20:08:23
Sandra Maischberger discussed Friedrich Merz and the black-green option. Carsten Linnemann and Omid Nouripour had a humorous exchange.
On the evening of the announcement of Friedrich Merz’s candidacy for chancellor, the topic was set for Sandra Maischberger. As a special spin, the moderator had planned to explore what the decision for the CDU chairman – and against his CSU counterpart Markus Söder – means in terms of possible coalition options. She asked several times whether the door would be somewhat more open for a black-green coalition with Merz. While the Green Party co-chairman Omid Nouripour spoke out against “exclusionism”, CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann reacted rather reservedly to the topic.
The guests:
- Omid Nouripour (Alliance 90/The Greens), party chairman
- Carsten Linnemann (CDU), Secretary General
- Constantin Schreiber, “Tagesschau” speaker and author
- Petra Gerster, author and former “heute” presenter
- Yasmine M’Barek, journalist (“Zeit Online”)
- Michael Bröcker, Editor-in-Chief “Table Media”
Linnemann, who stated that the announcement date for the K question had been set for “a long time”, namely “several days ago”, did not even want to accept the formulation that the Bavarian Prime Minister had “withdrawn”. “We want to win the future here – with Markus Söder,” said the CDU politician. The Union had wanted to achieve a “surprise effect” by announcing the personnel decision before the Brandenburg election, and had succeeded in doing so.
“We’ll take everyone who comes,” Omid Nouripour commented on the decision, not wanting to say whether he would have preferred Hendrik Wüst or Söder as a competitor: “Each of these three has weaknesses that you can work with,” said the Green Party leader. When asked whether he believed that Markus Söder would prove to be a team player from now on, he had a humorous answer: “Markus Söder is completely unpredictable, so it is also conceivable that he will be constructive.” But this will have to be observed in the long term, after all, the CSU leader has “gigantic flexibility.”
In order to work out the differences in content between the two, Sandra Maischberger resorted to the tried and tested method of “yes-no questions”. While there was still agreement about the need to support Ukraine with long-range weapons or the stationing of US missiles in Germany, the answers to two central questions were contradictory: “No,” said Carsten Linnemann when asked whether the next federal government would reform the debt brake; “definitely,” said Omid Nouripour. The CDU man affirmed that “comprehensive rejections at the borders are the order of the day,” while the Green replied “No, that’s not possible.” This brought us to the current controversial issue of migration policy.
“It’s great for democracy that we’re both arguing now,” Carsten Linnemann interjected, praising Friedrich Merz for bringing this debate “into the center of parliament.” While Omid Nouripour blamed the CDU for the failure of the recent talks between the traffic light coalition and the opposition (“The CDU said: Either you do what we want, or we’ll stand up and leave.”), Linnemann denied that there had been an ultimatum from the Union. Rather, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had initially promised to talk about rejections at the border, but then this was no longer an issue.
Omid Nouripour, however, was skeptical that the border controls that have now been decided on were the right way to go: “I am very curious to see how long the measure will last,” said the Green Party member. On the one hand, the federal police do not have the financial capacity to permanently monitor Germany’s external borders. On the other hand, the “internal market cannot be completely destroyed.” Linnemann also admitted that border controls were “a fiasco for trade policy.” “But for me, security comes first.” The CDU general called for asylum procedures to be outsourced to third countries and quotas to be agreed so that “the right people come to us.” Omid Nouripour pointed out that it was not possible to “simply deport problems in the security sector.”
After Sandra Maischberger had once again brought up the coalition issue by mentioning the black-green state governments in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, the conversation turned to Omid Nouripour’s much-noticed quote about the traffic light coalition as a “transitional coalition” and the question of how long it would actually take until the next federal election. “Then please put an end to it now,” shouted Carsten Linnemann, and was open to quick new elections. Omid Nouripour, however, stated that despite all the quarrels, the traffic light coalition had “a few more things” planned. And he couldn’t resist a little dig at the FDP: “It’s not so easy to say that the dispute will end in four weeks. Among other things, because Mr. Kubicki’s Twitter account still exists.”