Von und zu Schallenberg therefore has everything you need in the foreign service of the German Empire – pardon the Republic, of course. It is surprising why the crowbar diplomat in the china shop still finds it so difficult to find the right tone.
For the first time exposed to the dazzling limelight of the chancellorship, our holy judiciary was preempted and his even holier predecessor was granted absolution. The soup was too thin, and Sebastian was innocent, of course.
And, as if Schallenberg had chosen jumping from blunder to blunder to be the most refreshing form of physical exercise, shortly afterwards he also threw the investigative file in question to the ground in front of running cameras.
Not only “chief prosecutor” Meinl-Reisinger was “not amused” by this and the neo-chancellor’s apology for “putting it aside” was clearly too late.
But what do we care about yesterday’s chatter, as the great Konrad Adenauer already knew. The only thing that matters is learning and getting smarter.
But if you then look at how Schallenberg straddles the Ukraine phalanx of his party friends and colleagues, the hoped-for learning effect is sorely lacking. Historical revisionists equate Austria’s 1938 happy union with the Russian attack, the battered Ukrainians are denied the prospect of full accession to the EU and, last but not least, our beloved and everlasting neutrality towards folklore is trivialized – to which one should nevertheless adhere.
“I don’t know what’s going on with Schalli lately…” tweeted party friend and EU enlargement commissioner “Gio” Hahn and probably said, “If you had kept silent, you would have remained a diplomat.”
There is still hope that more remains of Schallenberg’s work on Minoritenplatz than a few wooded heaps of stones.
