The Duran Podcast - German industry decline, and Merz feels fine

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

German industry decline, and Merz feels fine

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the German economy and the collapse of the German economy. It seems to be collapsing a lot faster than we thought that I thought. But I guess Merz is doing a much better job collapsing the German economy than anyone had anticipated. And the I of Deck continues to rise. And we're seeing Alice Vidal come out more and more with more energetic speeches and statements about. about the incompetence of Mertz and his government. So, I mean, it seems to me as if Vidal is starting to position herself as someone who is capable to lead Germany and to get Germany out of this mess that Mertz has created. We are not looking at a German economic decline. We are looking at an industrial collapse and it is accelerating.

I was looking at figures for steel production in Germany. Germany is a significant steel producer, not perhaps a dominant producer in the way that it was once upon a time. That steel is often a good indicator of the overall state of a heavy industrial system. And it's just plunging. I mean, the speed and acceleration of the collapse, since mid-summer is extraordinary, and it's now starting to affect the entire car industry as well. I mean, one of the reasons steel production is falling is because there's increasingly collapse of demand for steel, which tells you that the rest of German industry is contracting.

And as I said, the industrial decline in Germany, as I said, is not, it's on a decline anymore. I mean, it's like, it's like an abyss. It reminds me a little of the terrible summer and winter in Britain of 1981 during Thatcher's period, which is a very different one. I mean, it's a very different time in many ways, but I can remember then how you're reading every single day about factory after factory across Britain, closing down Britain's indicted astral base imploding at an accelerating speed. Of course, Thatcher did have a plan and a project that looked beyond that. Merz, as far as I can see, has none. And Germany has been much more constructed around its industries than the Britain of the early 1980s was. So this is an astonishing

rapid decline. And as you absolutely rightly say, the IFDA is gaining in strength all of the time. It is now, I think, established conclusively as Germany's most popular party. These trends, if they continue for very much longer, we're going to see the IFDA starts to creep beyond the 30% level, which it has on occasion hit, but never broken through. If it starts moving above that and consolidates above this, then I think we will start to see panic across the general political system and perhaps moves to replace mouths with someone else. Interesting.

No elections? No, no, they won't go for elections. They will do everything they possibly can. To avoid elections. to avoid elections. They will look for trying to find, maybe, you know, just finding a different chancellor, maybe a more centrist figure or something of that kind. And of course, they will do all the usual things, talk about banning the IFDA. Bear in mind, the more popular it becomes and the more established it becomes,

and the stronger its position in local government, the more complicated politically. and administratively, that becomes as well. I mean, the moment when it was a relatively straightforward thing to ban the eye of death has perhaps already passed. I'm not saying they won't do it, by the way. I mean, that's a completely different thing. They might very well do it. But it would be a much more complicated thing to do now than it would have been, say, two years ago or even a year ago.

But they will try to avoid an election. They will try to cobble together some new coalition. They might eventually reach out to the Greens, though bear in mind that many, many people in Germany blame Germany's ongoing deindustrialization on the Greens. So, you know, like the going into coalition with the Greens is going to make things even worse. And you could start to see that there's increasing tensions

within the coalition itself, within the SPD, there was a really bizarre plan that Mautz came up with and which he negotiated with some people in the SPD that since it's looking increasingly unlikely, they will find enough people to volunteer for this big, you German army that Mautz wants to create, that they have some kind of lottery, whereby the people who lose the lottery are then conscripted, or people who win the lottery are conscripted. The German defense minister, Pistorius, said, this is ridiculous. There's no conceivable way that this can work, and I'm against it. And this created all kinds of anger and fury within the SPD itself, because of course,

Pistorius, who is, by the way, a very, very much a hardliner over Ukraine and Russia, Anyway, he was breaking ranks with other people in the SPD. But when people come up with these weird ideas, these very, very strange and ridiculous ideas, you can tell that things are not good in the coalition. Mertz's popularity continues to fall. I think it's the fastest decline in popularity of any German chancellor since the establishment of the Federal Republic back in the 1940s. And we are about to see, you know, the vast funds from the debt binge released, and that might provide a brief upward bump in the economy.

But more and more people, I think, are gradually coming to understand that that's not actually going to reverse the industrial decline. It's going to accelerate it because it's going to suck in imports. and undermine the competitive position of German industry still further, and it will accelerate industrial decline. You know, when you listen to Mertz, it doesn't seem like he's too preoccupied with the German economy. No. He really couldn't give an F.

I mean, that's the impression that I get when I watch him or listen to him. He's traveling around Europe, wherever he can go and hang out with Macron and Stamer and the other losers. I mean, he's completely aligned with. with the group of losers, the E3, the group of losers. And he's completely invested in Project Ukraine. I mean, he has zero desire to tackle Germany's problems. I mean, problems of his making.

But he doesn't want to fix them. He doesn't want to deal with them. He seems completely disinterested. And whenever anyone mentions the problems that Germany has, he just blames it on Russia. Absolutely, yeah. Which is very much like what all our shawls used to do, but with MERS. So how does Germany deal with these guys? How come Germany just doesn't deal with these guys once and for all?

I'm talking about the German parliament or the German people. I mean, you know, you have a leader who doesn't care. He just doesn't care. Well, I think, again, this is the question you've just asked could be asked at every single European leader. And it's the same question. You can ask about the European leadership altogether. And logically, in any rational world, you know, you.

in a world where politics worked, these questions should have been answered years ago, and we should have seen a completely different change of direction. The one extraordinary thing about the European project is the extent to which it's managed to keep going, year after year after year, even as it leaves the people of Europe behind it. I mean, you know, we're seeing the economic fall and collapse and decline now reach Germany itself. And yet still, as he rightly say, Merz continues as he has. And still, there aren't the moves, the necessary moves, to get rid of him.

I mean, the functioning political system, people in the CDU, would we say, who is this crazy man that we made Chancellor, everything's falling apart around us. He's coming up with absolutely zany ideas now of creating a European Stock Exchange. This is his latest idea. Bear in mind, that's actually very insidious, because if you create a European Stock Exchange, you are basically undermining the position of Germany's own stock. exchange, which is an important financial sense. And what you're also doing is you're taking a massive step closer towards Eurobonds and all of that. Because if you have a single European stock exchange, you have a single European financial market and you can start to float bonds

on it. So, I mean, that is the direction of travel that That seems committed to taking Germany. In other words, more Europe as well. More Europe as well. That is his plan. Now, you would have thought, as I said, that people in Germany, you know, the people in the CDU who were deeply connected with their societies, their communities. I mean, I used to know Germany very well.

And one of the most striking things about German politics was the economy. extent to which regional chapters of the CDU were very much connected to the life of their communities. So, you know, business people, small businesses in Germany, they would all be part of the CDU, they would go to the local chapter, they would say, I've got problems, I need funds. The CDU would have the various connections with the regional government, the regional government would then go to the local Fox Bank or whatever it was, the person, the businessman would again get the loan on good terms. It all sounds, you know, very cozy, but it worked. And it was part of a party that was there.

It was entwined in German life. So in its different way was the SPD, by the way, and, you know, through the unions and all of those kind of, you know, organizations. institutions that used to exert. It's incredible to me that that CDU that I remember will allow itself to be led along this path of self-destruction, self-destruction for itself, but also for Germany and for the communities it comes from, in the way that is being done now, without rebelling against it, much more, much faster than it seems to be doing. Helmut Cole, by the way, I remember him, you know, when he was Chancellor. I mean, he reveled in all of this. He was the Chancellor who had absolute contact with the grassroots right across Germany. He used to have, you know, the networks, you knew all of the CDU networks incredibly well. He was a typical CDU politician.

That's is somebody who, as far as I can see, is nothing like a CDU politician of the kind that I remember. Like every party in Europe, the CDU and the SPD have just become globalist parties. Completely so. All the center, the centrist party, center, left, center, right. They're all just globalist parties now. You have to go to the edges now if you want to find any kind of difference. Well, the edge in Germany is the IFTA, which is taking the place of what the is becoming increasingly closer to being what the CDU used to be. And you're going back to Alice Vidal, who you were talking about. Absolutely.

I mean, she's becoming increasingly the dominant figure in German political life. I'm going to say it, I think of the right wing leaders in Europe at the moment, she's frankly the most impressive. She's the one who takes this whole system on intellectually, more effectively than anyone else that I know. And she's developing very, very strong, rhetorical and parliamentary skills. You can see that she's getting stronger all the time. And one has to say that she does look like a chancellor in the making, much more. So than Nigel Farage looks prime a prime minister in the making in Britain, or indeed Marine Le Pen looks like a president in the making in France.

In the case of Alice Vidal, she absolutely does look back. And that is going to have an effect in Germany itself. A prime minister in the making in the UK, Farage, perhaps? Farage came out actually with a very aggressive statement towards Russia, huh? Yeah. If any Russian jets over the UK, Farage is going to show. shoot him down. Tough, tough Farage is going to shoot those plays down. I mean, well, this is an example of why I say compared to Vidal. He does look like a much more, I have to say, it's a much more shallow

and one-dimensional politician. The other thing, extraordinary thing about that statement is that it's clearly intended to distance himself from the earlier Farage, who was, well, I wouldn't say he was ever pro-Russian, but he had more understanding, if you like, of the, the Russian position than other British politicians did. He was better back then. Absolutely. And you know, why does he bother exactly? Yeah.

Because the old Farage, because most people who are supporting reform do so because they still have the image in their mind of the old Farage is sweeping the board. The latest opinion polls, but reform far ahead. We had the conference season in Britain. We had the Conservative Party conference, the Labor Party Conference. Remember, we did the program in which we talked about how hardly anybody turned up the Conservative Party Conference and that they were posting letters to Margaret Thatcher beyond the great. Well, the latest opinion posts show that after the conference season, the British looked at the various parties. Reform is on 36. Labor is on 20.

I think that is probably biased, actually. I think it's probably less than that. I've seen other opinion polls, which put it on 17. The Conservatives continuing to slide, they're down to 15%. In other words, reform is polling as much as Labour and conservative together. I mean, if reform starts to touch 40, then, you know, we would be looking at landslide territory. So why throw the bones?

Yeah, I was going to say that, so elections are out of the question. Oh, absolutely, out of the question. I mean, there's no way. And, you know, they've still got three years, well, four years to go actually in prison. And, well, what will happen to Britain in the meantime? I shudder to think, because of maybe. maybe the collapse in Britain isn't quite as spectacular as in Germany, but things are pretty bad here as well. And it was our debt position is far worse.

All right. We will end the video there. The durand.orgals.com. We are on Rumble and X and Telegram and go to the Duran shop. Pick up some merch like what we are wearing in this video update. There is a link in the description box down below. Take care.