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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
When Friedrich Merz became Germany’s chancellor this year, he promised to revive a moribund economy, rebuild the nation’s neglected infrastructure and making the country relevant on the global stage again. His failure to deliver on many of these core issues has not only helped energize far-right parties like the Alternative for Germany
Merz also caused confusion at an October meeting of European Union leaders, when he incorrectly reported a trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc had been concluded. He later brushed off the mistake as a minor issue.
Did he, though? I remember him more picking on the social democrats an especially the green party. Then he talked a lot about the AfD and immigration. But promising us a better economy… that was kinda rare moments during his campaigning?!
The promises of a better economy were implicit but very obvious given years of ranting about the Greens in particular being to blame for the economy.
Then shortly after election they even seemed to show a rare moment of understanding and admitted that Germany needs huge investments in the economy and infrastructure… to convice those they insulted for years for exactly such statements to cooperate on creating massive fund based on new debts they rigorously rejected before.
So there was a sentiment of “that was shitty populism and political maneuvering but at least they are doing something now…”.
Yet half a year later:
The investments into infrastructure are even lower than before. Unless you want to build even more new Autobahn sections or build huge amounts of expensive new natural gas power plants.
Investments into the “economy” are limited to those that don’t need it (but donate for their campaign). Like lowering taxes for the food service industry mainly helping the big companies like McDonalds that paid their party conventions. Or lowering taxes on air traffic. Or soon starting to subsidzse industries’ energy use to counteract the fact that their own brain-dead policies make energy more expensive. Or spending millions on culture war fairy tales like hydrogen and synthetic fuels so all those poor citicens can ignore the future and cling to their old cars.
Oh, and the parts of the budget planned for climate-friendly transformation of energy systems and industry are used to pay the EU fines for failing the agreed upon transformation instead.
Also we need to save a lot of money on social systems now as a literal trillion € in new debt is somehow not enough even when nothing of it is actually spend on its intended purpose.
But hey… at least they spend a lot of time on solving (again culture-war related) non-issues to save the country and ranted a lot about immigrants. Guess they only need to scream about all that bullshit even louder to divert from any actual problems. I guess they haven’t learned enough from all their MAGA friend’s advice and need some extra tutoring on how to flood the zone with shit more effectively.
Yes. It’s the usual Spiel about some felt (and made-up) reality we’ve embarked in with social media and MAGA and a bunch of societal dynamics. It’s about feeling some way, not about addressing any real issues. And I’d like to add the trains to your argument about infrastructure. Millions of people in the urban regions rely on them, they’re electric vehicles to begin with and we don’t have to be stuck in the daily traffic jam on the beat-up roads. Would be nice if we weren’t late to work every other day and then also spend additional time on the way home. I think there’s a bunch of problems with very straightforward solutions which also help with the environment and they’re an investment in economy as well.