The German government came under criticism after it utilised a loophole to allow ministers to escape their own COVID lockdown rules forcing people to wear masks on flights.
It appears that forced masking in Germany is for the plebian public only, with ministers in the country’s government provoking outrage this week after it emerged that they were using a legal loophole to get around their own COVID lockdown rules.
While the majority of nations across Europe have now long since abandoned their lockdown regimes, Germany has maintained forced masking requirements in places such as public transport, with officials planning to soon implement another regime of lockdown measures that will last for around half a year.
However, despite such forced masking requirements applying to all international flights in and out of Germany, reports on Tuesday emerged indicating that senior members of the country’s government — including the country’s political leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as well as climate change minister, Robert Habeck — were exempt from being forced to wear masks on a long-haul flight to Canada.
Provoking outrage among the German public, Der Spiegel reports that authorities later explained the absence of masks by saying that the flight to Canada was legally speaking conducted by the country’s air force, and therefore forced masking measures did not apply.
“There is no mask requirement on Air Force flights,” a spokesman for the government reportedly said, arguing that such a loophole was actually justified due to ministers apparently being given a PCR test before boarding.
This excuse ended up going down like a lead balloon, however, with German state carrier Lufthansa clarifying to its customers that, even if they present a negative PCR test before boarding a flight to or from Germany, they will still be required by law to wear a mask throughout the duration of the flight, a fact that only raised further questions as to why government ministers and staff were able to escape the discomfort of their own rules.
Such a PR disaster comes at a time when authorities in Germany appear to be outright antagonising members of the general public, with one state official even describing those who wish to protest the country’s chronic mismanagement of the COVID pandemic and the ongoing gas crisis as the “new enemies of the state“.
This official, like many others, predicts that the wealth of crises now facing the country as a result of a whole host of egregious errors by the political class will result in public unrest in the winter, during which many may be left unable to adequately heat their own homes.
“…after the pandemic and the world events of the last few months, we are dealing with a highly emotional, aggressive, pessimistic mood among the population, whose trust in the state, its institutions and political actors is at least in some parts afflicted with massive doubts,” one official, President of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution Stephen Kramer, said earlier this month.
Kramer — whose job it is to protect the integrity of the democratic German state — went on to say that unrest seen in the country over the last number of months in the form of anti-lockdown protests could ultimately be left looking like a “children’s birthday party” compared to the potential protests and riots that could be on the horizon.