Saturday, September 22, 2018

The Nahles-Seehofer Crisis

I sat and pulled up the German 'Bild' today (the German newspaper that most working-class people read), and read through the short piece they've collected on the two options that Seehofer is offering to end the whole Maassen-crisis with the SPD Party (I've essayed five or six pieces over the mess).

What Bild says.....is that there are two options on the table:

1.  Have Hans Georg Maassen swap his job (President of the Constitutional Protection Agency) with the BKA head (Holger Munch), who appears to be a supporter of the SPD Party.  The BKA, for reference, is the Federal German Police Agency, based out of Wiesbaden. 

2.  Have Hans George Maassen become the Minister for Security and International Cooperation.

What Bild then says?  Well....Nahles (head of the SPD Party) said 'NO' to this idea before and will likely repeat the 'NO' again.

In the mind of the leadership of the SPD....Maassen has to appear 'fired'. 

So if we go back to the two options?  In both cases, the pay-level (it at least appears that way), would not be a pay-raise, as in the Seehofer original solution of chief of staff.

A crisis over mostly nothing?  Yeah.  I suspect that more than fifty percent of German society is asking how they got to this point, and how many hours of fruitless and worthless discussion that the public TV news crowd will waste upon this topic.  If they'd put this much effort into the asylum and migration crisis?  Well, it's best not to bring up that comparison.

I would like to believe that the coaltion continues on, but I think Nahles will find no solution and the executive committee of the SPD will demand she step down...and a massive anti-Seehofer trend will start up.  It's simply a nickle-and-dime being staged and the public isn't buying into it. 


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