Toni Kroos, a football millionaire living in Spain, says something about migration in Germany and is pulled into their corner by right-wing media.
Hopefully he won’t become an opinion maker: football millionaire Toni Kroos Photo: image/Pressin photo
No, that’s not the case Toni Kroos not deserved. The recently retired professional footballer has become the star witness for right-wing media spinners. The Young freedom or the agitators of the self-proclaimed ‘voice of the majority’. News portal Nius.de quote with great pleasure from the podcast ‘Lanz und Precht’, on which Kroos was a guest before the German team’s last match at the European Championship.
“If someone were to ask me,” Kroos said, “would you walk your daughter at 11 p.m. in Spain or in a big German city, I would say Spain.” Self-styled philosopher Richard David Precht, who normally pesters listeners with his opinions on world events in a duet, could only say, “Wow!”
The media professional knew immediately that his podcast, presented by ZDF, had really made news. The program was even quoted from South Americawhere there is not much to hear but cheap cleverness. Germany is no longer safe and the blame is on migration, according to Kroos, according to the gist of the reporting. And so Kroos, who has repeatedly positioned himself unequivocally against right-wing tendencies in society, was pulled into their corner by the right.
In the podcast he spoke about a ‘feeling’ that had come over him: he was maneuvering and didn’t know how to express himself ‘so as not to be put in a corner’. Then he pronounced the fatal sentence. ‘Wow!’ Markus Lanz knew nothing else to say.
Informed by Markus Lanz
He did not ask whether a multimillionaire like Toni Kroos, who has already boarded a private jet to be taken to the national team, is the right person to talk to when it comes to the daily lives of young people in Germany. And he did not ask what Kroos actually knows about the daily lives of young people in big German cities. Likewise, he did not ask what it meant: ‘let it out’.
As if millions of young people in Germany couldn’t move freely through their hometowns without their parents opening the door for them. Sure, Kroos has family in Germany. But he’s been living in Madrid for ten years. “I’m very well informed through your show,” Kroos says in the podcast. Oh boy, you want to scream when you hear it.
But then Lanz starts a monologue in which he says almost nothing good about Germany; there is a crack in every corner. And he has also found a nice word for it: ‘loss of control’. He literally overwhelms Kroos with his tirade, and so the man, who has done little more in his life than play football, has almost no choice but to follow the moderator and talk about the lack of control over migration.
Backed into a corner
Markus Lanz really corners Kroos. “It’s too busy, it’s too much. “It’s overwhelming,” Lanz says at the end of the conversation. And when someone says that, they immediately say: “Oh, oh, oh, that’s racist.” People know the lyre.
And then Kroos has to say something about it, talk about migration instead of football and then babble a bit about loss of control. At the end, Precht gives him his blessing and says that it couldn’t be said much better. The podcast is a sad example of how opinion influencers like Lanz and Precht can make others express their views on things. “Wow!” They really did a neat job.
And Toni Kroos? Hopefully he won’t become an opinion maker.