The Duran Podcast - Germany; AfD momentum, Merz militarization

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

Germany; AfD momentum, Merz militarization

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Germany. Let's talk about Frederick Mertz. And let's talk about the continuing rise of the IFD. The IFD continues to gain momentum in Germany. Mertz continues to talk about the militarization of Germany, which it seems the UK media supports. Mertz's militarization of Germany, which is a bit strange. But anyway, what are your thoughts on what's going on in Germany?

Well, you know, we've just had the election in Germany. Mertz is not yet Chancellor. I mean, this ought to be his honeymoon period. He ought to be popular. I mean, that's what usually happens when somebody's elected. Of course, he was elected with, you know, on a very low percentage of the electorate, was a 28% voted for the CDU, CSU, which is really not at all impressive. And what's happened is that since the election, his popularity and that of the CDU, CSU,

has actually fallen, whereas that as the IFDA has grown. I mean, they're now polling between 23 and 24%, according to the official opinion polls. and the CDUC CSU are sliding. So this program of militarization, doing away with debt breaks, flooding Germany with money, is not popular in Germany. It may be enthusiastically backed by the British media, which you are absolutely right about, by the way. It may be sending all sorts of economists, you know, to ecstasies of joy,

because they assume that flooding Germany with money is going to somehow achieve an economic renaissance there in industrial resurgence. But the German public doesn't believe it. And they're right. Their instinct on this is absolutely, absolutely correct. Now, Meertz was never particularly popular with the German people. He was never a leader that, you know, people warm, to very much. Schultz and the government that went into the election were deeply unpopular.

People were still not prepared to vote for the IFDA in the numbers that would have been needed to really revolutionize the situation in Germany. I mean, the IFDA would need to get about 25% to 30% to really create, you know, that kind of momentum in German. But they were never particularly popular on him. He was never particularly popular with Germans. But, you know, they've seen how he's behaved since the election. He went into the election and won the election on the basis that he would defend the debt break. He broke that promise. He then used this extraordinary device of calling back the old German parliament, the one that, you know, had existed before the election, in order to get this vote to remove the debt rate passed.

And that really did look manipulative and ugly. And he then did a deal with the Greens, who are very, very unpopular with many people. I mean, they may, you know, have a core of support, but a lot of other Germans. Really don't like them. Anyway, he did a deal with the Greens to get the debt break past. And he continues to talk about militarization and conflict with Russia and talks all the time about war with Russia and war being Germany having to be ready for war within five years and all of that. And I think more and more Germans are becoming very, very alienated from this. I think that there is tired with Project Ukraine as many people in the United States, for example, are. Maybe not quite at the same extent,

but it's heading in that direction. They see in Matt's a chancellor, a future chancellor, who is manipulative and dishonest, who doesn't do what he says he's going to do. And I think they have grave concerns about the direction he's taking Germany on, a direction towards war with Russia. Germans have good reasons not to one war with Russia. I mean, they fought two, and it turned out very badly for them in both. And I think they don't really trust or believe in his economic program either, which, by the way, may be subject to legal challenges.

So already this is a very bad start. I wonder whether this coalition is going to last the course also. And already there are starting to be voices of dissent beginning to appear. The Minister President of Saxony, who is a member of the CDU, who is a East German politician. Saxon is in East Germany, but he's now come out and said, you know, why are we persisting with this sanctions policy against Russia? Sanctions don't work. They've heard us more than they've heard the Russians. Let's reverse that. Let's get back to trading with the Russians again. Let's

look to de-escalate tensions. That's what Trump is doing. That is what we should be doing. Other voices from within the partner party, the SPD, are coming out and are saying, saying the same thing. They're saying, let's try and get Russian pipeline gas coming back to Germany again. He's not yet formally chancellor, and already the cracks are shown. What do you make of his economic policy, or at least what we know about it, which I think is quite a lot actually militarization and infrastructure, I guess. those are his two big plans, right? What do you make of it? Especially the militarization is drawing a lot of controversy and is drawing a lot of fear. Rightly so. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of

countries are watching this German Chancellor talk about building a huge military. Of course, he says it to take on the Russians, but, well, as you said earlier, we already know what what happened in the last two world wars. So what do you make of this? Is this something that countries, people should be afraid of? Or is this just Mertz being a black rock guy and just looking to take it from deindustrialization to financialization of China? Yeah, it's the second in terms of what Mertz is actually going to do. Does the first not worry you? It does worry me because obviously, I mean, there will be some attempt to build up a German military, and that will make a lot of people nervous. And we will probably see a return to that kind of more nationalistic

rhetoric. There are an awful lot of people in Germany who don't like it. Young people overwhelmingly don't like it, boasts on the left who vote for delinker, mainly, by the way, young women, and on the right who vote, you know, boys who would serve in the army, but who are the people who are overwhelmingly voting for the IFTA. And by the way, the BSW is still there. Zara Vaghe Knecht is also still there. She also, of course, is opposed to all of this. And it's important to remember she almost got 5%. She was basically at 5%. There's still apparently legal challenges also about this, which, if they're successful, could change the electoral balance in the Bundestad. Just say, so this is not popular and it's not popular with

precisely, it's least popular with precisely the demographic, the young people who would presumably be expected to serve in this great army that Mertz is talking about. But the way to understand Mertz's economic policy is to understand that it is the same as Joe Biden's, except. of course, that Germany does not have the strengths that the United States does. I mean, Joe Biden basically sped money on an enormous scale. He ran enormous deficits. He flooded the United States with money. He was going to rebuild America's semiconductor industry. He was also going to invest massively in infrastructure. He was going to do all of those things, if you Remember, we had the Chips Act, we had the Inflation Production Act, which is really all about, you know, pumping the United States with money.

He also was going to have an extremely assertive foreign policy. He was going to put the Russians in their place. He was going to put the Chinese in their place. He was going to create this League of Democracy to fight the League of Autocracies, which was China and Russia. And, well, we all know how that ended. higher inflation, massive budget deficits, lower living standards for Americans, and ultimately a deterioration in America's economic and geopolitical position, and ultimately, a defeat for the Democrats in the elections which took place in November.

Germany does not have the resources that the United States does. It does not have the world's reserve currency. It is not a continental economy. It's already done immense damage to itself by cutting itself off from Russian gas. Bloomberg is now finally picking up on the fact that gas reserves in Germany are perilously low, lower than they've ever been at this time, I believe, in a gas. energy cycle. And interestingly, gas reserves continue to fall throughout March, even in late March, at a time when they ought to be increasing. So what is Matt's going to do, despite the fact that as a German, it's a weaker position than the United States. He's going to do exactly the same thing as Biden. He's going to spend a huge amount of money. He talks about re-arming Germany, setting up all these great factories to build all these weapons, converting Volkswagen factories into tank factories. And despite what some people say, that is not a straightforward and simple

thing. I have been involved in industry. And I know, and you know, tanks of the 1930s are very different from the tanks of nowadays. For one thing, if you're going to build tanks in huge quantities. You need enormous amounts of steel and heavy materials. Germany's steel industry is in decline. You have to import iron ore from all sorts of places. You're going to create huge stresses in the German economy. You're going to take away production from consumer goods to transfer it to things like

tanks and armored vehicles and infantry fighting vehicles and guns and, artillery shells and all that kind of thing. And the result will be consumer goods shortages, imports of raw materials, imports of consumer goods to try to satisfy domestic demand. Inevitably, that's going to lead to higher inflation, widening a move towards eventually budget deficits. Remember, that is what lifting the debt break is all of about. It is about letting Germany run budget deficits. That also means a current account deficit, a trade deficit. It means ultimately more debt, all of this in advance of a potential energy crunch in the autumn. It's frankly going to spiral Germany into deeper industrial and economic. And he

economic decline, it's going to create enormous problems within the German economy. It's going to lead to higher inflation, higher prices, and lower wages and incomes for Germans. That's what it's going to do in the end. But it's going to make things cheap for BlackRock for merchants bodies, right? Is that the whole goal to this? Yeah, it's going to create all kinds of assets because you can have companies folding and collapsing all over the place. you're going to have a liberalized financial system because all of this is packaged, baked into the cake, there is a much more liberalized financial system. So you have leveraged by-hunts and asset management swaps and all of the things that Americans have become so familiar with when they follow the, you know, the news, the economics, what passes for economic use on their programs, all these people who turn up on American television.

shows until you invest in this and invest in that and all that kind of thing. We're going to have all of that in Germany now, but on a scale that Germans have never seen in an economy that doesn't have the shock absorbers that America does. So it'll be great for BlackRock. It'll be great for people like Matt's himself. And, you know, he believes in all of this because he's worked inside it. It's what he knows. He thinks this is the way to run an economy. I mean, I, he doesn't, I think, fully understand what the long-term implications of this are. But that's what we're going to have. We're going to have a financialized, much more unequal Germany than the one we've known, one which is expensive rather than cheap, one where there's higher unemployment

than there has been historically, one where there is embedded inflation, one where there is very high debt, one where money flows not into industry and businesses, but into assets, into houses and property and that kind of thing, a Germany very different from the one that existed previously and one which will be less militarily strong than it has been before. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think Merz really cares about German inequality to be quite honest. I don't think that concerns him at all.

Of course he doesn't. Or the long-term outlook for Germany either. No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. But it's important to say that the old-fashioned CDU did. I mean, they may have been very committed to free markets, which nominally they were. But if you know anything at all about the way in which the German economy used to be run in its heyday in the 50s and 60s, it was actually very paternalistic. I mean, German companies, particularly the Middlestan companies, had very, very strong bonds between owners and workers.

It was an extraordinarily patriarchal system. And, you know, I don't say that with any hint of criticism. It worked really, really well. But that was the old CDU of Lowe ago. Today's CDU is going to be something completely different. Yeah, just a final thought. If people are thinking, well, you know, long term or even medium term, the CDU is going to get punished for this in whatever next.

elections come up in Germany, I think Mertz and all of these globalists are just looking at canceling the AFDE. And that's how they're going to solve their rival problems of the AFD, just cancel them. So you solve that problem as well. That's what they're going to try to do. Exactly. Exactly. That is precisely what they're going to do. Again, people talk about, you know, the safeguards in the German constitution, the constitutional court in Karsruhe, which will throw all of out. I think people, I mean, I used to think like that myself. I've long since come to understand that relying on legal and constitutional safeguards in today's Europe is pointless. Ask Marine Le Pen, in a country, France, which used to absolutely have rule of law, you know, the Code Civil and all of that.

Ask Marine Le Pen. Ask Salvini, Mathieu Salvini. Ask Georgiecu in Romania. If you think that's not going to come back in Germany, then you're deluding yourself. Yeah. All right. We'll end the video there. Haditha, deran.orgas.com.

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