It’s not easy for a German camera crew working at the White House to get a good spot for their camera. In terms of priority rankings, the German media are about as important as the Albanians. Which is why Heike Slansky, a correspondent for German public service channel ZDF had to be particularly persistent in her efforts for footage when Chancellor Angela Merkel came to visit President Barack Obama in America at the end of June.

Just as Obama and Merkel were walking past the camera, the German chancellor said: “We have to prepare our election campaign.” Obama smiled, waved his left hand somewhat nonchalantly and said, “Ah, you’ve already won. I don’t know what you always worry about.”

Merkel laughed, but looked surprised. And the ZDF cameraman realized immediately that he had captured a very unusual scene. When the piece went to air Slansky opened her piece on the current affairs show, Heute Journal, with Obama’s words — although she did not add Merkel’s hard-to-comprehend earlier comments. And the tone of the correspondent’s voiceover made viewers expect a light-hearted story on the relationship between Obama and Merkel rather than a piece of hard news. Besides, the death of pop singer Michael Jackson dominated headlines on the Friday of Merkel’s visit. So Obama’s comments on the German election outcome went largely unnoticed.

Nonetheless the forecast is astonishing, especially in the middle of the German election campaign. It is standard diplomatic practice among allied nations for governments not to predict the outcome of each other’s elections. But Obama’s throwaway comments appear to indicate that his team consider Merkel’s election victory a given. 

At first the team working for Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier — the Social Democrat nominee running against Merkel in the September 27 federal election — tried to make out that it wasn’t really clear from the original recording what Obama was actually talking about. You couldn’t really hear what Merkel said beforehand, they argued. But after SPIEGEL heard the complete recording several times, including the comments from Merkel, and confronted Steinmeier’s team with it, the eventual reaction was sharper. Steinmeier “thinks a great deal of Mr Obama but even an American President is no prophet,” they said, adding that German voters are the only ones who can decide who will become Chancellor.

The full story here.