TV column - On "Hart aber fair" it becomes clear: Germany now needs a talk show moratorium

An election campaign, by its very nature, always leaves something like a battlefield behind. Now that the smoke of the past few weeks is slowly clearing, a breather is urgently needed: lower your blood pressure, get rid of your emotional baggage, gather your strength - and then, with a cool head, forge new coalitions.

What Germany definitely does not need one day after the federal election is a talk show. And certainly not one that – like “Hart aber fair” – wants to know in great detail: “Who will change Germany now?”

Apart from the name Friedrich Merz as the newly elected Germany changer, even the boldest moderator cannot expect any serious answers to personnel questions just a few hours after the first projections.

Louis Klamroth tries anyway. He wants to know from Marie-Agnes Strack Zimmermann whether she would like to succeed Christian Lindner, even though she is probably just happy to be in a good state of order in the European Parliament in these times when the FDP is critical.

Klamroth also asks Wolfgang Schmidt – previously head of the Federal Chancellery under Olaf Scholz – what his career might look like. And he wants to know from CDU man Philipp Amthor whether he has already picked a cabinet post.

Amthor finally finds the right answer to such unnecessary questions: achieving a stable government in times of international uncertainty is “somehow more important than any office for any of us”.

For the television viewer, “hard but fair” is also simply an imposition after four weeks in the election arena, political speed dating, final round, TV duel, jungle camp. Because – perhaps due to a lack of knowledge about the near future – it is of course primarily about coming to terms with the past.

Schmidt and Amthor are at such loggerheads over the Union's alleged breach of taboos that even before exploratory talks have begun, doubts are being raised about the next grand coalition's ability to govern. Is it still an election campaign?

Journalist Gilda Sahebi sums it up succinctly: “For me, the last few weeks of the election campaign were political theater, not politics.” But with this “tough but fair” round, there is an uneasy feeling that the curtain has not yet fallen.

Not yet recovered from the gasping for breath of the last few weeks, the talk shows are already putting together new rounds of the last remaining political actors. This time, not only Schmidt, Strack-Zimmermann and Amthor are on "Hart aber fair", but also Andreas Audretsch, deputy parliamentary group leader of the Greens in the Bundestag. It's just what gets stuck in the broom when you sweep the political floor after the election.

You fight the AfD by solving problems, Klamroth sums up the nervous argument between his opponents at some point. A sentence that cannot be emphasized enough.

Less arguing, less criticizing each other and instead doing more: that would be nice. But the talk shows also urgently need to get this right: let politics do its thing sometimes.