June 13, 2022
STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY IN THE FACE OF EVIL?:
Olaf Scholz gets lost in communication over war in Ukraine (HANS VON DER BURCHARD AND LAURENZ GEHRKE, June 13, 2022, Politico)
Sometimes, the issue is simply Scholz's enigmatic sentences -- the chancellor long ago earned the nickname "Scholzomat" for his mechanic, austere speaking style.Other times, he has been caught over-promising or changing his story. At various points, the chancellor has offered misleading claims about Germany's aid to Ukraine, given multiple accounts of why he hasn't visited Kyiv yet and shifted the timelines for important weapons deliveries.Most recently, Scholz raised eyebrows with the bold -- and untrue -- claim that "no one" had supplied Ukraine "on a similar scale as Germany does.""You have to be careful that such communication doesn't come across as strange," said Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the German parliament's defense committee and a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), which governs in a coalition with Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. [...][T]he result has been that Scholz's government -- despite being a major donor for Ukraine, injecting vast sums into its own military and soon supplying Ukraine with state-of-the-art German howitzers -- is getting slammed at home and internationally. The opprobrium seems to have even had a spillover effect at the polls, with Scholz's SPD recently falling behind the Greens in a national poll for the first time in months.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2022 12:00 AM
