I went viral for a meme, but Scholz's hesitancy over Ukraine is no joke Timothy Garton Ash

A couple of weeks ago, at a moment of huge frustration over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foot-dragging on allowing Leopard tanks to go to Ukraine, a Ukrainian friend sent me a satirical mockup on “Scholzing”.

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Next to a photograph of the chancellor, it defined Scholzing, dictionary-style, as: “verb: communicating good intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening”. I found this amusing, quickly re-tweeted it, and thought no more about it. My Twitter account seemed to be buzzing, but then I’d been writing a lot about the issue.

Six days later, I was watching an interview with Scholz on German television when the interviewer confronted him with “Scholzing”, attributing the coinage to “a British historian”. I went back Twitter to find that this one quick tweet had been viewed 1.1m times. In German and international media, the definition was being widely quoted as mine. Since, as we all know, the internet never lies, it has now become a historical fact that I thus defined “Scholzing”. ( I subsequently clarified this on Twitter, but no one reads the clarification.)

I asked my Ukrainian friend if he knew who was actually behind this satirical mockup. He didn’t, but Ukrainians have been using the word for months. Already last June, a tweet from @biz_ukraine_mag reported that “to ‘Scholz’ is now an accepted term in Ukraine meaning to continually promise something without ever actually having any intention of doing it”.