The Chancellor’s ‘Whataboutism’ Bedside Manner

At a briefing in Berlin on Wednesday, the government spokesman handled questions about Friedrich Merz, Gerhard Schröder, and Benjamin Netanyahu the way a man with a private vice handles a room full of witnesses: he picked the bodies he wanted to inspect and left the others standing there in their coats.

He called Schröder’s meeting with Vladimir Putin “morally indefensible,” then immediately went slack when asked whether the same language should apply to Merz’s public courtship of Netanyahu, who also faces an International Criminal Court warrant. The moral exam was suddenly very selective. One man got the full clinical glare, the next got a hand on the shoulder, and the third was waved through like a preferred customer who knows which side of the curtain gets the softer touch.

The first answer came wrapped in disinfectant. The second arrived with the damp apology of a tie loosened too early in a room that was still recording. Journalists pressed on whether the standard depended on the calendar, the party card, or the simple fact that some foreign leaders are treated in Berlin like old lovers with bad habits: tolerated in public, defended in private, and never asked for anything as vulgar as consistency. The spokesman did what cabinet people always do when they are choosing whom to handle and whom to leave cold. He smiled, adjusted the sheet, and acted as if the whole question had been too intimate for daylight.

In Wedding, where political principle is mostly something people are told to respect by men with rent subsidies and public pensions, the exchange landed with the usual tired rage. Outside a café near Leopoldplatz, and a kiosk that had already sold coffee to delivery riders, retirees, and one man arguing with his own reflection, Mustafa Yilmaz said the government sounded less like a ministry than a doctor with a favorite patient.

“Either you say meeting sanctioned men is beyond the pale, or you admit you only mean it when the wrong old man does it,” Yilmaz said. “Otherwise it’s not ethics. It’s a bedside routine. One gets examined, one gets excused, and everyone in the room can smell the cologne and the panic.”

That is what makes the whole thing rotten. Schröder is cast as the shameful uncle, Merz as the polished son-in-law, and Netanyahu as the guest the chancellery keeps inviting because the seating chart matters more than the warrant. But the government’s language keeps behaving like a man deciding, sentence by sentence, who gets undressed for scrutiny and who gets to keep his shirt on. Severe for one, protective for another, and suddenly shy enough to stare at the floor when asked to explain the principle beneath the hand movements.

A spokesman for the chancellery said only that the government’s position on “sensitive foreign-policy questions” remains unchanged, which in Berlin usually means the position was negotiated by whichever donor, columnist, or coalition partner had already slipped into the back room and closed the door.

By late afternoon, opposition figures were demanding a clearer line, while activists outside the Foreign Ministry held signs accusing the government of practicing selective outrage with the discipline of a man who wants credit for fidelity while keeping three phones on vibrate. The spokesman did not return the follow-up questions before evening, and no one in the building seemed eager to say which affairs count as scandal and which are simply the kind of favor Berlin likes to perform with a straight face.