Merz-Dämmerung

The Chancellor has no clothes.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

We have here before us the final stages of an inexorable, terminal process. In this story Merz’s role is but a late and a small one; Merkel wrote the early chapters, and regular installments will continue until the Federal Republic is destroyed or politically reconstituted. Every Chancellor is going to be a bigger joke, even weaker and more ineffectual and more retarded than the last one. Every government is going to be even more paralysed and ridiculous than the heretofore most paralysed and ridiculous government that preceded it. Our industry will waste away while new taxes sprout like weeds, rail will grow less reliable and tickets more expensive, health insurance premiums will increase and medical care will get worse, schools will just get shittier and shittier. There will be no answers, no fixes and no succour, until the devolution is complete.

The problem is not merely the demise of a single chancellorship or a solitary party, but of an entire political world. Thus even longstanding Merkelian éminences grises like Peter Altmaier have begun to refer to our situation as a “crisis of the state.” Since its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic has been so closely identified with the two great people’s parties – the CDU and the SPD – as to be effectively inseparable from them. Other nations like France have extremely fluid political systems, but in Germany a combination of prior conservative cultural tendencies and a burdensome, deliberately enfeebling constitution has yielded one of the most inflexible political cartels Western parliamentary democracy has ever seen. The Social Democrats are already in a state of advanced decay, and now the Union parties are following them to a similar fate.

What awaits us at the bottom of our freefall is either a total reconstitution of the uniparty around Alternative für Deutschland and the Union in some dwarfed, reduced form; or an AfD ban and an institutionalisation of leftist rule in a less dogmatic reincarnation of the German Democratic Republic. The former seems vastly more likely right now, but of course that could easily change. Because we don’t know what will happen when we try to run different political software on our slow, overburdened constitutional hardware, it’s impossible to say whether the Federal Republic can even survive this resolution, and in no scenario will more than a portion of the present political elite make the squeeze.

Other countries would’ve adopted half-measure reforms to head off the cataclysms that are coming for us years ago, but not Germany. It is in our ethnic character to do everything longer, harder and in more determined suicidal fashion than everybody else. We must take everything to the absolute extreme to demonstrate our moral commitment, in the process proving to everyone else how stupid our ideological persuasions actually are. In this way our worst politics will sooner or later become their own refutation and their own undoing. Unfortunately the whole process takes a long time and is both extremely destructive and eye-wateringly expensive.