When the wrong claim turns into a program!
“I hope that she can do in the USA what she does for the German people” is one of those sentences. Sentences that reveal more than any long explanation. Not because of what is said, but because of the idea behind it: that a single influencer is elevated to the role of spokesperson for an entire country, as if she carried some kind of mandate that no one has ever given her. Many people react with anger, and they have every reason to. Someone who has spent years moving through right wing networks, playing down climate change and presenting herself in the USA as an opponent of science and education does not speak “for the German people”. She speaks for a political scene that lives off blurring lines: between opinion and mission, between a private stage and a public mandate.
That WELT spreads this sentence without any distance comes across as a gift to those who like to present Germany as a uniform construct, guided by self appointed “truth messengers”. The majority of this country, the people who work, doubt, discuss and do not allow themselves to be pushed into rigid patterns, do not appear in such sentences. That does not make them invisible. It only shows how carelessly some media are willing to confuse role and reach. Anyone who claims that a single person speaks for “the German people” is really saying one thing above all: that he has little to do with the real country, with its diversity and its everyday life. And that is exactly why so many are upset. Not because of her. But because of the claim that stands above everything, and that is simply not true.
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