Franziska Giffey makes room for herself

Berlin's Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey resembles a butterfly that has gotten into the living room, persistently flying against the pane of the closed window and ignoring the other one next to it, which is wide open. If one can assume that the moth doesn't know any better, Giffey's case is different. The SPD's top candidate for the office of governing mayor knows better.

At any time she could choose the obvious path - the voter pointed it out - and approach the winner from the CDU as a loser in order to join him as a junior partner in a black-red coalition. Instead, she fusses. Giffey prefers to roll up his sleeves and hopes to move into the Rotes Rathaus as boss in the throng of well-known party-political zigzags and trick tracks.

There, Giffey apparently only got out of her chair to make room for herself. The woman, who in her friendly averageness always pretends that she always has an ear for the Berliners, whose concerns and needs are more important than those of the parties, is not even bothered by the fact that even her own voters want a new edition of the red-green - reject the red coalition. While Giffey is walking around town like a personified calf cramp and publicly giving the contrite, she has the chutzpah to use her 105-vote lead over the Greens as justification for becoming ruler of the city again.

Apparently, for Giffey, the shortest route between two points is the detour. And a lead of 105 votes is a lead of 105 votes. After all, it is part of democracy to recognize majorities – however small they may be. But what about the 149,122 second votes? It is precisely this sum that accounts for the lead of the CDU over the Berlin SPD. Do 105 votes carry more weight than around 150,000? Apparently for Franziska Giffey and her party, otherwise they would have to leave the field to CDU top candidate Kai Wegner.

If the previous governing parties were not so stubbornly trying to keep the coalition together, the Left Party could, given the arithmetic somersaults of the SPD, come up with the idea of ​​daring a double Rittberger and claiming the office of governing mayor for themselves.

Although the Left Party lost only 12.3 percent of the electoral votes, while the SPD got 19.9 percent, the lead of the Social Democrats to the Left is only 94,024 second votes. So it is much smaller than the CDU's lead over the SPD.

However, it will not come one way or the other. There is much to suggest that Franziska Giffey will not rest until a red-green-red government is under her leadership. What is unfortunate is that, of all people, those who present themselves as close to the people, in their quest for office, power and a company car, are fueling the slight disgust with politics that can already be felt in Berlin anyway. If Giffey goes this route, she should never refer to the Berliners again.