War, hunger and Corona are the worst bouts of fever in our dangerous present. On her show “Woche,” talk show host Sandra Maischberger invites the best prospects into puffs of fog on the news front.
The guests
Cem Ozdemir (56, Green). The Minister of Agriculture is one of the three most popular politicians. His concern: “Putin is using the grain shortage as a weapon!
Antoine Fauci (81). The American immunologist and presidential adviser judges: “Classic herd immunity is no longer possible, nor is it necessary.” He is connected from Washington.
Frank Ulrich Montgomery (69). The head of the World Medical Association has long warned: “The number of deaths will increase further!”
Hannah Bethke (41). The journalist (“Neue Zürcher Zeitung”) blasphemes that the printed word of the press has a different weight than the spoken word on a talk show. Phew!
Sasha Lobo (46). The columnist (“Spiegel”) replied to the “open letter” from “Alice Schwarzer & Friends” to the Chancellor with an “open counter-letter”.
Theo Koll (64). The head of the ZDF capital studio puts Putin “between Napoleon and a gas wholesaler”.
Three doers and three opinion makers. Who gets the most points? The Zoff-O-Meter matters.
Most Surprising Protection Aid
“Politically, I’m pretty red-green with liberal touches,” “Spiegel”-Lobo said at the start, “so I didn’t miss an opportunity to go after Mr. Merz.”
But now he hails the opposition leader’s trip to Ukraine as an “important symbol”. And: “It’s still the case that this is about self-expression and an election campaign at the same time.” His overall verdict: “It was a real hit.”
The Zoff-O-Meter starts
As for Steinmeier, too, the “Spiegel” man holds his Iroquois red comb bolt upright. Colleague Bethke finds kyiv’s difficult decision to slow down the Federal President’s self-serving PR campaign “bottomless” and a “huge affront”. Lobo, on the other hand, prefers to stand up for the Ukrainian ambassador, who has since been the subject of fierce hostility.
The fact that Andrei Melnyk acts “very brutally”, says the columnist, has something to do “with the fact that in Germany people have long made themselves comfortable and have squarely courted Russia. And Mr. Steinmeier was there too. “Boom!
Most conclusive assessment
The ‘Spiegel’ man says of the background to the embarrassing scandal: “I can well understand that you are not completely enthusiastic when someone wants to cling to the Polish president, and that he is not not welcomed with open arms!”
Lobos’ second accusation: “To be honest, I think that’s a pretty weak reaction from Olaf Scholz! They used to call him ‘offended liverwurst’.” Thinly concealed smiles all around.
The most shameful review
“I cannot understand this insult,” exclaims the Iroquois. “I find it totally unsupervised. As Chancellor, you really have to stick to this, otherwise there will be a funny babble of We as Germans, where you say: For God’s sake, our holy Federal President!”
Lobo’s urgent recommendation: “I believe that in such an incredible situation that Ukraine has to endure, such national sensitivities might just be swallowed up gracefully.” There’s initial applause for that.

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strongest accusation
ZDF-Koll also positively rates Melnyk’s irresistible urge to be troublesome: as “a strategy that creates maximum pressure to help”.
This is still not enough for the columnist of the “Spiegel”: “With its dependence on Russian energy, Germany has helped to put Russia in a position to be able to wage such a war of aggression in the first place”, growls- he.
sharpest edge
Lobo’s clear demand: “I consider the fact that the concerns of Eastern Europeans have been ignored for years, also by Mr. Steinmeier, unfortunately, to be a responsibility which actually means that we now have to help the ‘Ukraine.” And a little further than is currently the case.
With “this ambassador who is said to be so controversial”, we must add: “Olaf Scholz has always reacted very hesitantly. I think that without the debate that Mr. Melnyk initiated, that he took to a whole new level of sound, the decisions would not have been made like that. ” Hat !
Most emotional memory
Özdemir is presented by the talk show host as “a minister of agriculture with a soul of foreign policy”. An ARD clip wants to prove it with a quote: “You can’t stop a genocide with a yoga mat in your hand”, the Green Party tweeted in 2019 about the terror of ISIS against the Kurds in Syria.
The Minister declared, visibly moved, to have experienced for the first time a genocide in Bosnia at the beginning of the 1990s. “I was in Sarajevo. They (the Serbs) sat upstairs, drank their slivovitz, and when the civilians (mostly Muslims) came to town, they shot at them.
Most painful achievement
“Disarmed people!” Özdemir is still indignant after so many years and raises his hand accusingly: “And we, as Europeans, said that we had to negotiate!”
“Negotiations between a heavily armed army and largely unarmed people!” growls the Green. “Since then, it has become clear to me that there are certain exceptional situations where you take sides when you say: strong and weak, murderer and victim should clarify this between them.”
Most plausible explanation
According to the Minister, even during his first peace demonstrations at the age of 15 in the 1980s, he remarked: “You cannot be against the missiles from the West, but you can keep silent about Eastern Missiles. “
Özdemir’s alternatives to Ukraine: “First: you intervene yourself. Second, you become a war group. Second, you help Ukraine defend itself. If you say no to both, then you say yes to murder, in this case almost to genocide!”
Clearest verbal criticism
In the direction of those who understand Putin, Özdemir said gently: “I don’t want to scold those who say: We have revised our position there. I think the word in German means ‘I’, so ‘I’ was wrong.”
Maischberger wants to know whether this is aimed at the Federal President. The minister doesn’t want to say it so directly, but the general rule is, “The word ‘we’ has replaced the word ‘I’.

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