Not At, But With
I laughed. Not at a politician, but with one—a distinction I did not expect to be making. Peer Steinbrück, the center-left SPD candidate running against Angela Merkel in Germany’s federal election, appeared on Circus HalliGalli, an entertainment show on ProSieben hosted by Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf, two men who have built careers on controlled chaos. Something about it, despite every intention I had to stay unmoved, was genuinely funny.
The context: a few weeks earlier, Steinbrück had appeared on the cover of Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin with his middle finger raised. Germany reacted as though he’d taken a hostage. Editorials. Panels. A man had shown the finger and this was treated as a matter of national moral significance—while the actual substance of his positions mostly got swallowed by the noise. The press loved it. The bar-stool commentators loved it. The country it was supposedly scandalizing did not benefit from any of it.
We push politicians into a corset of perfect function. Decisive but not divisive, emotional but not about anything specific, human but in no way that could be photographed badly. And then we act surprised when they lie, when they crack under the weight of promises nobody could keep, when they finally explode in ways that should have been obvious years earlier. The middle finger was the most honest thing that man had done in months. It meant almost nothing. It meant something.
On Circus HalliGalli, Joko and Klaas put Steinbrück through a mock debate—asking him whether he’d legalize hashtags, which of Obama or Putin had better swag, whether he’d pre-ordered the PlayStation 4. He cleared each question with a fluency that seemed to genuinely surprise his hosts. They had apparently expected him to run aground and he refused to. That combination of self-awareness and speed in a politician is rarer than it should be, and I kept waiting for the moment it slipped. It didn’t.
The show itself is a strange organism. ProSieben is normally a home for the 2000th episode of TV Total and target-demographic game shows, but Circus HalliGalli operates like something that drifted in from another frequency. That evening included an interview with Die Ärzte—Germany’s most beloved punk band, conducted apparently at maximum volume by design—a voter survey at five in the morning on a Berlin bridge with young people who were going to catch hell from their parents, and a segment inside the Big Brother house in which Palina Rojinski, the show’s Russian-German co-host, stood under a shower while an elderly aristocratic woman whose name I always forget planted herself directly in front of the camera at exactly the wrong moment. If that happens again in a future episode, I will demonstrate that there is a small Peer Steinbrück in me as well—the kind who shows his feelings unfiltered. The resulting explosion would be appropriately sized.
Steinbrück looked more at ease here than he had in any official debate format—less managed, more present, willing to be in the room rather than merely occupying it. Which might all be calculation. Politics probably is. But I found myself wanting to give it the benefit of the doubt, which is not something I often feel about German federal elections in September.
He lost, as almost everyone expected. Lost the election, I mean—not the evening. The evening he won by being funny at a time when being funny was exactly the wrong thing to do. Sitting there laughing at a chancellor candidate’s answer to a PlayStation question, without having planned to, and not regretting it afterward—that was something. The middle finger was something too. Give the man credit for both.