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Merkel is just finding out how German compound words can come to bite you later. She framed the term "Öffnungsdiskussionsorgien", most obviously but not helpfully to be translated as "opening discussion orgies".
This can mean different things, which can be exploited.
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This can mean different things, which can be exploited.
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What she is talking about is that debate in Germany is all about what businesses to open when, and her reference to orgies is quite obviously referring to everyone wanting to get a share. First it was about small businesses, but then larger ones felt hard done by.
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So you had bigger shops and shopping centres or IKEA arguing that they could open just part of their stores, to stay within the allowed square metres. But that basically led to almost no restrictions remaining.
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The fascinating thing now is that while her "orgy" point was quite obviously about everyone wanting to be involved in the opening, so her complaining was about the pile-up on who can open and who cannot ...
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... some interested commentators, mainly from the liberal FDP, are turning this into an accusation of her wanting to stifle debate. And it is then about whether the orgy party of her compound term was about an "orgy of discussion" or an "orgy of openings".
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The accusation is that it is the former, and that it means she is against an open debate, whereas any reasonable reading of what she said would imply that her worry was about the later - not intending to stifle debate but worrying about every type of shop wanting to open now.
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So now she is accused of being anti-democratic for basically just urging caution in how German high streets can open again without risking what has been accomplished.
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I just thought this is an interesting cautionary tale about the use of German compound words, since whichever part is the penultimate in the compound word tends to be understood as the thing that the entire term is about.
Here: "ÖffnungsDISKUSSIONSorgien"
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Here: "ÖffnungsDISKUSSIONSorgien"
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So in this case, she is interpreted as warning about an "orgy of discussion" rather than an "orgy of openings". it is all about bad faith takes, but the German language makes it difficult at times for the speaker not to provide a nice bait to the bad faith dissenter.
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