Liz Truss: Can I feel sorry for her now? UN debate on Iranian drones in Ukraine – the night update without photos

Who will survive longer: Liz Truss or a head of lettuce? This bet was streamed live on YouTube as the British Prime Minister fought for every extra day in office. In the end, the salad won: Truss resigned. After only 45 days in office, her career toast is, as they say in English, done, fini.

I don’t know Liz Truss personally. I find the policies they represent fundamentally wrong and it shocks me how a country can be miserable as your government has done. And yet I catch myself: I feel sorry for Liz Truss.

The whole world saw a person fail without a doubt and watched every step. Much malice was and can be seen, especially among those who knew from the start (when she took office in the Süddeutsche, the writer AL Kennedy called Truss “cognitive impaired” and compared her to a five-year-old, “who has just run into a door.” “).

Truss’ party was pleased to say that they were always considered incompetent and therefore were not immediately fired, at least to give the British the illusion of being ruled.

At the same time, pictures of “Zombie” Truss appeared in the tabloids in the infamous flash through the windshield mode, where everyone really looks like the last drink was bad yesterday.

But again, Truss is not a kid to be bullied. She was, albeit briefly, the head of government in one of the most powerful countries in the world. In her hands lay the fate of millions and a commission that she handled from clumsy to disastrous (although it is sometimes overlooked that Truss was less responsible for tax reform than for the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury).

Can you sympathize with someone in such a position of power? Isn’t it rather the case that everyone who enters such an office has to be able to handle everything? Did he or she know?

That is certainly true, but why do you have to separate one from the other, the claim of empathy, the people of the function? Especially because the position of power is always relative: sympathy for politicians seems to arise only when they have no future, a last welling reflex of sympathy before they sink into insignificance (which interestingly enough seems to affect mainly social democrats – Martin Schulz, Kurt Beck , Andrea Nahles – but only in passing). Something that always contains a final humiliation, even without a head of lettuce.

That says a lot about how we view politicians. “Nobody wants a victim as chancellor,” the FAZ sneered when Schulz lost the federal election weeks before the actual date, not wanting to hide how frustrated he was.

When former German family minister Anne Spiegel asked for understanding for the excessive workload she used to justify her fatal mistake during the flood disaster, she was met with a wave of hatred. How dare she demand sympathy and still want to remain in office?

Now on

It is often said that compassion is not a political category. That’s true insofar as it would be the worst possible reason to choose a politician – no one should know that better today than Martin Schulz.

But compassion is political because it forces us to endure a contradiction: one can feel sorry for someone whose failure is largely their own fault and whose resignation is the only right step.

You can occasionally sympathize with someone whose political activities you detest. Not least because probably very few of us can imagine what it’s like when the newspaper says about you: she did everything wrong – and now she’s getting what she asked for.

Next to the salad in the livestream is now an open bottle of champagne, and the corks are popping even louder from those who survived these 45 days unscathed and of course afterwards claim to have nothing to do with it. I’m sure there will be compassion too – if only in secret.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed headlines and subtitles. Here’s the original.