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BERLIN — A nearly six-month lockdown, the coldest April in 40 years and a population on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Welcome to the German spring of 2021.
The mood is dour even by German standards. April showers bring May flowers? If only.
“Everyone is opening up, only we stay closed!” Bild screamed across its front page this week, capturing the nation’s frustration that other countries have vaccinated more quickly.
Disappointment has been palpable ever since January, when it turned out that EU countries were going to need significantly longer than the U.S., the U.K. and Israel to move beyond the pandemic by inoculating their populations.
When it rains, it pours
News this week that German doctors are disposing of unused vaccine hasn’t improved the mood.
The equivalent of more than 40,000 vaccine doses has been thrown away in Hamburg alone because medical staff are only allowed to draw six shots from an individual vial instead of the available seven, public broadcaster NDR reported.
Taking an extra dose from a vial “is not forbidden, but it means that the user must be particularly careful and diligent,” a spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Berlin clarified.
While the pace of vaccination has quickened, Germany still lags well behind Europe’s frontrunners.
Although Brussels-based bureaucrats were blamed early on for having botched the procurement of sufficient vaccine doses, Germans quickly also identified boogeymen in the ranks of their own national government.
Health Minister Jens Spahn, who was extremely popular as recently as Christmas, has taken much of the blame for pandemic problems in February and March, while Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, saw voter approval decline amid a corruption scandal that involved lawmakers of both parties profiting from mask deals with the government, in some cases allegedly to the tune of millions.
A week ago, a roster of German actors and artists did its best to deflect attention (if unwittingly) from the government. The group, seeking to highlight what many consider the absurdity of some pandemic restrictions, launched a sarcastic video campaign on social media, ridiculing the government and mainstream media for conjuring a state of fear across the country.
What followed is what Germans would call a shitstorm. And a major one, at that. The artists were excoriated online and television, in long-winded newspaper feuilletons. The overall tenor: How dare they!
Some of the participants in the project were so spooked by the reaction that they took down their videos and issued official apologies, not least because about the only public support they received came from the ranks of the far-right Alternative for Germany party and conspiracy theorists.
Though the episode gave Germans a welcome distraction for a few days, a break from obsessing over the daily infection numbers, the reaction also illustrated just how on edge German society is at the moment. In normal times, a controversial stunt by a group of not-so-talented television actors might evoke little more than a snicker. These days, it’s FRONT PAGE NEWS!
The anti-establishment dissent voiced by the actors even has the authorities worried. They fear the initiative will embolden anti-lockdown protesters and warn of the overlap with far-right extremists who spread dangerous conspiracy theories.
The anti-lockdown crowd “accepts or even seeks connections to … right-wing extremists while the ignoring of official orders is propagated and the state’s monopoly on the use of force is negated,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement this week.
On Wednesday, German media reported that the country’s domestic intelligence service BfV has put some of the anti-lockdown movement under formal surveillance.
Never-ending lockdown
The assorted investigations, protests and calls for order have occurred against the backdrop of a lockdown that started in November and has been criticized by some as halfhearted and others as too rigid.
While Londoners are heading to the pubs again and Romans do as Romans see fit, the idea of opening bars or restaurants — or even just their terraces — still seems a distant prospect in much of Germany, adding to a defeatist atmosphere.
Just last week, the German parliament passed a law giving the federal government more powers to impose pandemic restrictions, leaving the state and local levels without discretion wherever there are more than 100 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants.
Like so much else in the pandemic, the new law divided the country. Too little, too late, many complained. A massive violation of states’ sovereignty, others howled.
To vent, the Germans did what they always do when they get really angry: They sued.
Within just one week, more than a hundred lawsuits were filed with the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, ensuring that Germany’s COVID saga is not coming to an end anytime soon.
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