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> Angela Merkel doesn’t do drama and she doesn’t give speeches on TV. I've seen this reported a few times, and it's always stated and never explained. My quest
by zck 7y ago
> Angela Merkel doesn’t do drama and she doesn’t give speeches on TV.
I've seen this reported a few times, and it's always stated and never explained. My question: why doesn't she?
Not "why doesn't she do drama", although digging into her biography would also be interesting. Why doesn't she give speeches on TV?
I suspect some of this is because there's a split between the President and the Chancellor of Germany, but I don't know much about the politics there. Being from America, I don't easily grok the difference between "head of state" and "head of government". I also don't often hear about the German President, making it seem like the Chancellor is more important.
- detaro 7y agoOutside of the New Years speech, German chancellors generally don't do "TV speeches" (I recently saw a number of only 5 other cases where they did: Iraq war, Kosovo war, 2x reunification of Germany, RAF terror). That of course doesn't mean things they say aren't distributed, just that it's unusual as the formal address to the nation. E.g. they can speak in parliament, and we might see that speech or snippets of it distributed. And they do give statements to press. Not sure how much of a role the split plays, e.g. the President doesn't do it that much either. For Merkel specifically, she's generally happy to let others do the talking, observe the reactions and then act according to that, in what one could call a fairly passive style.