German Foreign Minister whines that he's "not a wimp" and Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaks of his government's impending "failure" as our political chaos deepens

I know I keep saying that the coalition is hanging by a thread, but it really is hanging by a thread.

The chaos of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s lame and unstable coalition is deepening. We may be approaching the end.

First, the acute if lesser crisis: Last week, our listless and morally hypertrophic Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul visited Syria. It should’ve been simple enough; all he had to do was shake some hands and talk about human rights and democracy or whatever. Instead, while touring some bombed-out suburb of Damascus, Wadephul choked up …

… and for no reason at all said there was no way Syrian refugees in Germany could be expected to return to such a place, because “people can hardly live in dignity here.” This was a knife in the back of his Union colleagues, for whom at least the appearance of a tougher stance on migration and an increase in deportations is a matter of political survival. It didn’t help that Wadephul’s words seemed to echo Article 1 of the German Basic Law (on “human dignity”) and may therefore provide fodder for our judiciary to make the repatriation of any Syrian refugees all that much harder.

CDU leadership have spent the days since Wadephul’s spontaneous stupidity trying to repair the damage. Yesterday, at a car-crash internal CDU meeting, MPs were at first willing to let the matter slide, but then Wadephul insisted on speaking in his own defence and everything went rapidly downhill.

From BILD:

“[Wadephul] should simply have said nothing, then the discussion would’ve been over,’ a senior MP said … According to BILD, CDU Secretary-General Carsten Linnemann expressly advised Wadephul not to speak at the parliamentary group meeting.

Instead, Wadephul took the floor and gave an emotional speech … He declared that Syria looked worse than Germany in 1945. He pointed to a cross on the wall and appealed to the Christian view of humanity. He said that he had nothing to take back … He said … “I am not a wimp.”

Lol, lmao even.

Since that speech, the voices demanding Wadephul’s resignation have grown much louder. Right now only two things seem to be keeping the man in office, namely the absence of any clear candidate to replace him and the political damage an already catastrophically wounded Merz would take were he to switch out his top diplomat a mere six months into the legislative period.

At that same disaster meeting yesterday, Merz displayed various line-go-down graphs. One of the lines going down is our gross domestic product, and another one of the lines going down is private investment in the German economy. The only line going up is the one tracking government spending.

Merz said that … if these lines did not converge during the current legislative period, one would have to say that “This government has failed.”

“The fact that a Chancellor would even mention the failure of his own government just a few months after taking office caused shock and paralysis among the ranks of the parliamentary group,” participants said. While there have been rumours for some time about the possible end of the Merz coalition, since Tuesday it has finally become the number one topic of conversation in the halls of the Reichstag …

Merz also propounded upon the necessity of trying to get the SPD in line. Saying things like that is the one thing most guaranteed to keep the Social Democrats out of line, as their present strategy is to increase their leftist appeal by demonstrating their independence from their coalition partners in the CDU and CSU.

No one in the Union wants to commit to how long the federal government will last. The fact is that Merz’s “cityscape” debate … is not yet over, the debate on compulsory military service continues, there is no real social welfare reform in sight, and the repeal of Robert Habeck’s energy ordinances … is also currently being held up by the SPD …

Even members of Merz’s government team are speculating about how long this can go on. Union members say that if there is a break with the SPD, they will continue as a minority government …

The Bundestag is slated to vote on the 2026 budget at the end of this month, on 27 November. If the coalition comes apart before then, I don’t see how a minority CDU/CSU government can last. They’ll have no money unless they break the firewall and hash out some kind of deal with the AfD. If the coalition survives this month and the budget passes, then Merz might well fire his SPD ministers and try to govern alone for a year.

Some have begun to suspect that the Social Democrats are trying to goad the Union parties to break the coalition ahead of the budget vote. If that is indeed their strategy, then we have to ask why they’d vote to pass the budget at the end of this month. They would want to drive a crippled CDU/CSU into the arms of the AfD, and harvest all the mobilising potential of that circus for their own activist purposes.

I would say there are only even odds that this coalition sees December. Any normal coalition would’ve long since succumbed to chaos like this. The only thing keeping this one upright is the sheer absence of political alternatives – beyond the only party with “alternative” literally in its name.