Lufthansa strike forces Hillary Clinton to take the purgatorial Deutsche Bahn to the Munich Security Conference just like everybody else

Also and more importantly, a long-overdue update on dysfunctional Germany

Yesterday Lufthansa pilots and cabin crews went on strike, forcing Hillary Clinton to slum her way on the train to the Munich Security Conference.

In this video, you can see the former First Lady and U.S. Secretary of State disembarking from her filthy Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express from Berlin, which had naturally suffered an electrical fault that disabled the restaurant car and with that, all possibility of coffee. Munich Central Station is one of the worst train stations in all of Germany; the place is awash in trash and smells always of urine and french fries. It is a very minor pleasure, watching political elites being forced to navigate the very same dysfunctional landscape all of us have to deal with every day.

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“eugyppius,” said absolutely nobody ever, “why has it been so long since you last updated us on Germany? Is nothing going on? Tell us something please.”

The problem is that German politics have degenerated so much in the past year that it is becoming very hard to write abut them.

In the post-Merkel era under Olaf Scholz, insane new crazy bad inadvisable unbelievable stuff would happen almost every day; in the post-post-Merkel years under Friedrich Merz, absolutely nothing can happen no matter how bad things get. After an unstable period comprising the second half of Covid and the pious afterglow of St. Greta (before the latter took up her charitable sailing initiatives), we have settled into a new order. Imagine an airplane piloted by heedless methed-out lunatics. For a brief time they enjoyed aerobatics well exceeding the engineering specifications of their craft, until they snapped a few flight control cables, and now they have become the prisoners of their own recreations as the altimeter ticks down and the ground rushes up at them.

Metaphors are fun but specifics are healthier. As everybody knows, the centre-right Christian Democrats are in a coalition with the newly hard-left Social Democrats, and the latter are determined to block every last initiative, reform and legislative proposal, however mundane or plainly necessary or routine. A little over a year ago, I wrote that German politics had become stuck, and that was true enough back then. What is true right now, is that they have achieved a stage well beyond stuck. The federal government is in a coma, an indefinite vegetative state, on life support – totally paralysed and neither dead nor alive.

We’ve gone over the reasons so much, I hesitate to recite them again, but I will. At the root of our present crisis is a shift within the German left that has had cascading consequences for the party system as a whole. Basically, the left has become both more scattered and more extreme in the last five years. They have become more scattered, because climatism is decaying and this process of ideological unravelling means that leftists have lost a crucial focal point used to rally activists and moderates alike. They have become more extreme, because the general rightward shift in politics is depriving the Social Democrats of their traditional moderating, working-class constituents. These are migrating steadily to the Christian Democrats and ultimately to Alternative für Deutschland.

As the left slowly boils down to their activist base, they become more radicalised. The Social Democrats are no longer the family-friendly centre-left party of Gerhard Schröder. They want to fight, they want to burn things down, they want hell. The very same rightward shift, meanwhile, has had a nearly opposite effect on the CDU. They have lost many of their most engaged constituents and no few members to the AfD. What remains is a husk of dull, uninspired careerists, eager to maintain their good regard with polite society and their regular schedule of polite evening talkshow appearances. To break the present impasse, Merz or those around him must act decisively and make facts. He needs to fire all his SPD ministers, form a minority government and achieve some kind of rapprochement with the AfD. Alas, neither Merz nor anybody else in CDU leadership has the mettle for that kind of fight, which would also set off a series of catastrophic revolts within the CDU itself. Thus everything must remain frozen and broken indefinitely, while things get worse and worse and our ability ever to fix them decays.

These are the basic dynamics that would apply regardless, but 2026 is an election year. In a few weeks Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz will vote in new state parliaments; in September, Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin will follow. The SPD are desperate to deny the CDU any victories, however superficial or merely apparent, in advance of these elections. They will obstruct even harder than they did before, they will reduce all of federal politics to a state-level campaign tactic, and the CDU have no tools to stop them. During last year’s election campaign, Merz promised a Trump-inspired blitz of reforms from the moment he took office. This became a vaguer promise that we would have to wait a little longer for an “Autumn of Reforms” later in 2025, and now it is quietly admitted that nothing much will happen this year either.

The lesson here is simple and sobering: The cartel parties can indeed keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party out of power with ever grander coalitions, but beyond a certain threshold of AfD strength this tactic begins to cripple all of government.

This is obviously a big problem for my blog, because there are only so many posts you can write about how nothing is happening and how necessary reforms are impossible and how Merz the Pigeon Chancellor has gone back on his word yet again. The news cycle has filled with a lot of nothing stories that I am not even going to link to. Some weeks ago, for example, the governor of Schleswig-Holstein absurdly demanded that alternative media be censored on an evening talkshow, and then he denied he ever said any such thing, and there ensued a ridiculous weeks-long debate about what this clown who has precious little power to censor anybody actually said and why he said it or didn’t say it and what it all meant. In the total political vacuum we find ourselves in, the ghosts of past chapters in Bundesrepublikan politics begin to steam forth from their squalid graves. Rumours are swirling about a Green Party plot to nominate Angela Merkel for the Presidency of the Federal Republic. Former Covid Minister and noted saltphobic drunk Karl Lauterbach has made the shortlist to replace Tedros Ghebreyesus as President of the WHO.

Anyway, that is the state of things in Germany: Nothing is happening, nothing can happen, and for the foreseeable future nothing will happen. All the while the potential energy will build until finally, at some point and in a way as yet unforeseeable to us, a great many things happen all at once.

In the meantime, as I said, I am going to bring this blog out of its lowkey hibernation. There will be more posts! We will explore new topics! I will perhaps even experiment with new media!