The Duran Podcast - Germany Merz ramps up spending. UK Never here Keir

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

Germany Merz ramps up spending. UK Never here Keir

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the political and the economic situation in Germany. And we'll talk a bit about the UK as well. I think there's some interesting things that we can talk about with regards to the Stammer administration. But let's start things off with the Mertz administration. How is Germany doing? How is their economy doing? How is Chancellor Mertz doing? Well, one of the things that Matt's always sold himself as was the great free market,

per man, the person who knew economics, who is the person who would manage to get the German economy, moving again, who would bring Germany back to the kind of economic policies, that Germany followed in the 1950s with Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, the time of the German economic miracle, that, you know, he would do away with regulation, that he would restore fiscal discipline, that he would do all of these kind of things. He's doing none of those things.

We've now had a budget. And the new German government's budget is above 3% of GDP. In fact, I believe it's 3.2% of GDP. So it violates the Maastricht criteria which Germany has imposed and insisted upon in the past that other countries must follow.

Well, Germany is now, as I said, itself, violating Maastricht. But even that doesn't really come close to matching the reality, because since Germany has now done away, in effect, with its debt break, it's now going to spend fast amounts of money off the books on all kinds of programs, on infrastructure, on increasing defense spending on all of these things. And it's going to happen. When you start doing this,

when you start creating funds off books, which are not part of your budget, you're going to very quickly lose control of your budget. That's the first thing to say. The second is, obviously, Mouth's not raising taxes, because he's not in the business of raising taxes, but he's not cutting spending.

The welfare spend in Germany is on the contrary, growing as you would expect it to do, given that the economy is stagnating and probably even contracting in some sectors. But at the same time, you're increasing spending on all of those other things. They're going to lose control of the budget. They're going to soon start calling on the European Central Bank to monetize some of this spending. by buying German bonds. I can't see how else it can be done. Confidence in Germany's fiscal rectitude, I suspect, is going to start to melt away.

Some people are saying that within five years, Germany is going to have a debt-to-GDP ratio above 100%. I think it's going to take five years, two, three at the most. That's my guess. Does Merck care? Does Germany care? Well, I mean, it's a serious question. I mean, do they care any more about the well-being of their citizens, the well-being of the economy?

The European Union, we did a show and we talked about what the European Union has become, which is no longer an economic project. It doesn't care about the economics or the economic health of member states or of countries aspiring to be member states. It's a geopolitical expansionist project. Germany is obviously the key player. one of the key players in the European Union. Do they care about these things anymore? The leaders in positions in countries like Germany? The extraordinary thing about all of this is all being

done with minimal public debate. I mean, there's no real discussion about any of this. Once upon a time, this was a provoked heated arguments in Germany. I can remember, you know, 10 years ago when Schroeder was the Chancellor of Germany, of Germany and he was embarking in all kinds of economic programs and mounts at that time. I remember him at that time. He was a spokesman for the CDU and the two would clash and argue about policy. And you had that before? It did have anything like that anymore.

It's just as if they're kind of drifting into this. They don't want to cut welfare spending because that would be controversial. They don't want to do anything that is going to provoke strong opposition amongst the German public. They want to increase defense spending. They don't want to put out taxes. They've committed themselves to all this infrastructure spending. I have to say, Germany, to me, is starting to look like Italy and France. It's adopting, if you like, the euro model, which is,

you know, you just spend and go on spending. You rely on the European Central Bank to hold everything together. You don't worry about the fact that your debt is ballooning and you are convinced that you can go on doing this forever and that there won't be any problems. And besides, in Germany, you probably say to yourself, well, we are Germany. We can do this. We've always managed to do this before. So, you know, nobody's going to really criticize or take issue with what we're doing because, you know, they always assume that we're so strong, we're so disciplined that we'll be able to, of pull it off. I think that we've gone from Merkel immobilism, which is what Merkel represented. I mean, she never changed anything in German.

She kept everything as far as she could as it was. to an even worse situation, whereas as in Germany's drifting into becoming a typical, northwest European, welfareist, socialist, social policy, state. Not a socialist. I mean, we're not talking about the kind of rigor which the old social Democrats used to bring to economic policy in Sweden and Germany in the 60s and 70s. here at Tagger Erlander and Villiersbrandt and Helmers Schmidt and any of those kind of people. Nothing like that because there's no coherence to this.

It's just that, you know, this is what we do. We're going to spend more money fighting the Russians. We're going to let our mighty, once mighty car industry gradually rot away. We're not going to just worry about what's happening to other sectors. you know, our glass industry, which is optics, which is so important, all of those kinds of things, our chemical industry, which is going to drift along and, you know, keep going because by the time, you know, the music stops, all of the people who are in charge now will have gone and will have been promoted to other new positions and they weren't the health to account for it in any way

at all. So this is what it's become now. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Macronism, if you like, now arrived in Germany, draggyism in Italy. I mean, they're all morphing into this very thing. Complete lack of economic dynamism, no attempt to address the energy crisis, which is affecting industry and the economy. No real attempts to do any of these things. They don't care. They don't care. So talking about not caring about their citizens or the economic situation in their country, let's talk about Kier Stommer.

How is Sir Kier Stommer doing what's the situation like in the United Kingdom? Well, never hear Stommer. It's not what they're calling him here. I mean, that's become his, you know, and you hear this. I mean, people in pubs are now talking about him in that way. In other words, he's the Prime Minister who spends most of his time abroad. He goes from one summit to another summit. He focuses on foreign policy all of the time.

He's become Zelensky's biggest fan. He's the person who assures us that Donald Trump is not about to attack Iran, even as he's sitting a few meters away from Donald Trump just before Donald Trump attacks Iran. He is somebody who, as I suppose, most of his most of his, time on those things. And his economic policy, again, just as in Germany, has basically collapsed. I mean, there's no real sign of it. So they came in, the Labour Party came in. They said when they came in, that they would take steps to bring the welfare budget under control. They said that they would do unpopular things like cutting the winter fuel allowance to pensioners and taking

steps to cut disability benefits and all of those sort of things. None of that, by the way, would have made any difference overall to the underlying economic crisis in Britain, which is profound and very deep. It would have saved a certain amount of money, but nowhere near enough. But anyway, to the extent that they were talking about doing those things, it doesn't look like they will because the Labour Party MPs, in the House of Commons, who were all elected, remember, on a very low turnout, with a very low share of the votes, and are therefore extremely worried about their own prospects in any future election and are therefore extremely susceptible to any criticism that they get from the people

that they voted who voted for them. Anyway, they're all now coming out and saying that they are not supporting any of these welfare cuts. So there's been rebellions against this, protests against this, and we're going to have theatrical showdowns in Parliament, which nobody takes seriously. But the key takeaway is that the government is quietly giving up on any plans that he might once have had to try to bring the welfare budget under control. They have no real economic plans at all going forward. Britain's fiscal situation is poor. The underlying economy is poor. We have the highest energy costs in Europe. There's talk that taxes might have to be increased because there's worries about whether the bond markets are going to find the present trajectory unsustainable.

Most people who live in Britain will tell you that taxes are already too high and that increasing taxes even further is going to break the economy completely. But you get no sense that never here Stahmer and his ministers have any real plan or any real idea of what to do. and pretty much like Mertz and company in Germany, they're just drifting along, only they have less room and less headspace than the Germans do, because the Germans start from a position where they have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 65%, and they are an export economy, whereas Britain has a debt to GDP ratio above 100%, and we are an import economy.

So probably we will see the crisis hit us before Germany, long before Germany, is hit in the same way. The trajectory is so. As long as the trajectory of the UK is towards the European Union and back into the EU reversing Brexit, that's the important part. That's the important part. That's the other thing, because that's the other narrative, that the reason everything is going wrong is not because we can't get a grip on our situation in Britain, but because we left the EU. This is that you get article after article commentary, after commentary saying this, though there

is no actual real evidence that confirms this. It's not as if the European economy is booming and we're somehow doing worse than they are. Overall, we are not. So we are a sinking boat and our own boat is sinking. So we say to ourselves, what should we do? Let's clamber on to a bigger boat, which is also sinking. I mean, that seems to be the strategy that we have. And of course, the most important thing, the thing nobody ever talks about,

We must, of course, continue to give five billion pounds a year to Zelensky in Ukraine. That is the absolute priority. And nobody is allowed to discuss it or talk about it. You won't find any discussion of it in the media. You have to go through the figures to find out that it's taking place. Five billion to Zelensky and 10% for the big gap. Anyway, we'll let them. video there, the durand.locals.com. We are on Rumble,

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