Endgame Timmy the Whale, Endgame Merz the Pigeon Chancellor

Timmy the Humpback Whaletard wandered into the Baltic two months ago, inspiring a massive media drama on the one hand by repeatedly beaching himself off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and on the other hand by refusing actually ever to die.

Yesterday saw a new phase in this dubious epic, as Timmy’s team of crack whale-whisperers finally realised the latest of their harebrained rescue schemes. They parked a massive, flooded barge near our confused or possibly suicidal marine mammal and enticed him to swim into it:

It really is hard to exaggerate what an unimitigated clownshow this whole thing has become – a circus funded by a few wealthy philanthropists that BILD has secured exclusive rights to cover. As Timmy lumbered into his new quarters he exhaled, which one of our execrable expertoids interpreted as an expression of his thanks.

BILD posted the video seconds later under the headline WALELUJA.

Timmy’s rescuers drew a net over the exit and sailed off with their mentally challenged charge. At present the whaletard is floating in his improbable whaletub which is in turn floating in the Baltic, headed for the North Atlantic. The plan is to release Timmy back into his native waters, just so that he can return to make an even greater problem of himself.

Humpbacks are pretty hardy creatures, but they are not immortal, and if any whale is likely to die in the coming weeks it is Timmy. The selfsame state authorities who had earlier urged all involved to leave our unfortunate whaletard to expire on his sandbank in peace had a change of heart some weeks ago. The reason is not hard to fathom, if we are honest with ourselves. The last thing they want to deal with is a rotting whale corpse off the coast of Wismar. Tourist season is looming, twelve metric tonnes of putrid whale flesh is bad for business and I’m pretty sure that disposing of a dead Timmy on any reasonable timescale is beyond the capabilities of the Federal Republic in its presently crippled state.

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These are dark days for Friedrich Merz the Pigeon Chancellor. They might, in fact, be the beginning of the end for him.

Merz has become the least liked politician in all of Germany, with toilet-tier approval ratings hovering around 15%. It’s so bad the man can hardly bear to open his social media accounts any longer. This morning he went crying to Der Spiegel that “No Chancellor before me has ever had to endure anything like this” – the “this” in question being people calling him a loser and a failure on Facebook.

Even Merz’s erstwhile BFF Donald Trump has abandoned him. The Chancellor has been critical of the Iran war and that’s fine as far as it goes, but he broke new ground when speaking to a bunch of schoolchildren in Marsberg earlier this week. “The Americans went in to this war … quite obviously without any strategy at all,” he said, while praising the Iranians as “very skilful at negotiating – or anyway very skilful at not negotiating” and claiming that “the Iranian leadership are humiliating an entire nation.”

Trump responded with a rare direct rebuke on Truth Social:

As late as February Merz was wont to market himself as Europe’s foremost Trump whisperer. It was basically an implicit admission that although he was totally useless domestically, at least we could count on him to keep things smooth with our big American brothers. Now he’s not even good for that much.

German politics, I keep typing, have been mired in gridlock for a long time. The last time anything important happened was last January, and the problem with long periods of enforced stagnation driven by dysfunctional government is that the pressure for change is never properly diffused and only grows and grows. Suddenly we will pass from a world where absolutely nothing happens into a new world where a lot of really chaotic and on balance bad things happen all at once. Nobody can say precisely when the dam will break, but also too nobody can deny that it will happen.

Especially the fiscal picture looks increasingly dark: The German government avoided taking on any debt over the many years that the economy boomed and money was effectively free. Now interest rates are very far from zero indeed and the state cannot stop borrowing. Merz’s government have finally released their Federal Financial Plan, “which reads … like a declaration of insolvency” and predicts nothing but hundreds of billions in ballooning debts through 2030 to finance the social welfare system, to repair our rotting infrastructure and to rearm the Bundeswehr. The interest payments now threaten to swallow up every last free Euro of tax revenue. Practically speaking we probably only have two or three years of breathing room until the Federal Republic – one of the highest-tax countries in all of Europe – becomes effectively paralysed in its own morass of ballooning liabilities. That’s another big reason – and perhaps the most important reason – that nobody likes Merz anymore. His failed political triangulations and his total capitulation to the SPD are killing the country and ruining our future.

For about six months, the polls had Alternative für Deutschland and the Union parties more or less dead even with each other. Now the numbers have started to move again, quickly and dramatically. The CDU is in freefall, headed for 20% if not lower, while the AfD is climbing steadily, peeling voters away from the Union in a race for the 30% mark. Multiple surveys confirm the AfD has opened up a 4–5 point lead over the CDU and CSU, the biggest we have ever seen:

A lot of people have argued that there is a tipping point in AfD support – a point at which voter sentiment will shift irreversibly and in ever greater numbers in favour of the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party. Ours is a state dominated by a vast regime media system that spends untold resources demonising the AfD and running interference for the government however badly they fail. This strategy can work only as long as AfD support remains relatively low; beyond some threshold, the party will become increasingly normalised socially regardless of whatever the TV says, because AfD supporters will become so common in real life. Something like that already happened in East Germany in the aftermath of Covid; there, the the tipping point seemed to lie just north of 20%. The AfD has now reached that level of support in the West as well.

At this point Merz has squandered almost all support within his own party. The CDU is full of careerist people who see nothing but a grim future of shrinking voter share and ever fewer seats in the Bundestag and the state parliaments:

Following the heavy losses in the local elections in Bavaria and the latest poll in North Rhine-Westphalia (CDU: down six percentage points), it is rumoured that plots to replace Merz have been underway behind the scenes for some time. “It’s always the same,” an experienced CDU figure … says. “Either the bloke at the top delivers or they saw him off.” Merkel … delivered a long series of election victories and with them posts and power. Merz delivers nothing politically and the Union cannot win with him.

There’s only two ways for the CDU to get rid of their doomed Pigeon Chancellor: Unioners must either recruit the Social Democrats for their plot and arrange a vote to replace him with somebody else, or they must do the unthinkable, break down the firewall and form a new minority government with the help of the AfD. The only way Merz can save himself is by giving the SPD even more of what they want and ruining Germany’s future prospects still further, in the hopes of convincing his poisonous partners them that they’re better off with him than with any notional successor. In pursuing this strategy, of course, Merz further alienates his own party and increases pressure on the firewall. And all the time those autumn elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt are looming.

Today a reporter asked Merz if he could guarantee his government would last until the end of the present legislative period in 2028. He responded that “nobody can guarantee anything.”