The Duran Podcast - Germany unstoppable industrial decline

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

Germany unstoppable industrial decline

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the German economy. Things are not looking good. Germany is on a path to rearmament, to building the most powerful military in Europe, and they're going to do all of this by going into debt. So what is the situation in Germany? Well, there's been a fascinating article about all of this on the financial times. And basically what it is describing is an unstoppable industrial decline. It's talking now about an increasing industrial meltdown across Germany, a catastrophic loss of competitiveness about China, Chinese industrial groups, basically eating German industry for lunch.

I mean, the Germans no longer able to compete at almost any level against the Chinese. There's been similar articles in the Daily Telegraph, actually, a short time afterwards, talking about exactly the same thing, about Germany also going down rapidly. And if we go back to that Financial Times article, it is very scornful about this idea. that an industrial revival can be based around rearmament. It says that already an awful lot of the debt that Maths is creating is not going into actual infrastructure or rearmament. It is going into plugging holes in the industrial structure by providing subsidies to steel industry

or subsidistic other industries to try to sort of cushion their decline, which means basically their collapse, and also to plug increasing holes in Germany's welfare budget, which is exploding, even as the productive parts of the economy are shrinking. So people are losing their jobs. They go on to welfare, which in Germany has always been very generous. That's causing the welfare budget to rise. The German government has to find ways to finance that budget, and they're doing that through this debt emission that Mertz has been talking about. And the Financial Times article also said something, which, by the way, we've also said in previous program,

that the German military industrial complex is much too small to make up the difference. I mean, it simply cannot replace the huge civilian industry that Germany once had, and it doesn't have the capacity to grow in the way that Mouths is talking about. It made the point that the number of people who work in Germany's military industries is around 8,000, 8,000 and that Germany's toy making industry actually employs more people. So you throw hundreds of billions at the military industries. They can't expand at the rate that you are demanding. What you're going to do is all you're going to actually do is you're going to create debt and you're going to increase the cost of the wealth.

that you're making, because if you throw money at a system that can't expand as fast, inevitably the unit cost rises. So everything looks unbelievably bad, and the only answer that anybody was providing in this Financial Times article is start applying protectionist measures to try to protect Germany from Chinese imports. and use regulations about safety and national security to try to block out Chinese industrial imports and to stop the Chinese in that way. But protectionism of that kind for Germany would be an absolute disaster because Germany doesn't have the big internal market that it needs to be. be able to do that. And it needs to be able to compete with China globally. And if Germany

turns to that kind of protectionism, it's going to lose the ability to do that. So, straightforwardly, Germany is destroyed. We predicted it. And it's now happened. So basically, Germany, Mertz is borrowing money. He's going into debt in order to plug up other holes in his administration, in his budget, in the economy. He's not, I mean, what's all the talk about building the big military and all of that stuff? Shifting manufacturing from automobiles to tanks? I think it's mostly talking. I don't think it's anything else, frankly.

I mean, they will produce some more tanks. Let's say they increase production of tax from 12 a year to 18 a year. It's going to be on that kind of scale. But there is no way that Germany can become the mighty military, industrial power that people are talking about. Not when the rest of your industry is shrinking. I mean, it makes no sense, as we've pointed out many times. Now, there is an extraordinary gap in the Financial Times article and in all of these other articles

because they don't explain this sudden catastrophic loss of competitiveness, which is that one of the things that kept German industry competitive was low energy costs. That was based on imports of cheap pipeline gas from Russian. Russia, and that, of course, has been stopped. So where Germany had a competitive advantage in low energy costs, that has completely gone away. The Financial Times article never mentions it. It never mentions that energy costs in Germany today are much higher than in the United States and China and in other industrial competitors.

There is an extraordinary sentence in this Financial Times article. It says this, the number of unemployed in Germany has risen in 37 of 44 months since February 2022 to just under 3 million, the highest level in 14 years. What happened in February 2020? happened in February 2022, which is the moment when you start to see unemployment in Germany explode. And the article actually admits that real unemployment is rising much faster in Germany since that date because the German government has tried to massage the unemployment figures by basically doing what we are very familiar with in Greece and what you find in other places, which is taking

on more and more people by giving them public sector jobs. Right. Right. So what happens to Germany now going forward? I mean, Germany destroyed itself for project Ukraine. Ukraine is destroyed. Germany is looking like it's going to be destroyed. I mean, is that too much to say that?

The German economy, at least, the German economy is definitely not what it was just four years ago, right? The big engine of Europe. It's not even close to that anymore. No, the economic titan is fading away. I mean, Europe's economic heart is in crisis. Well, what does Germany do? The first is that it has an honest conversation with itself about what is happening and what has caused it. Now, here things are a little bit better than they are in some other places in Europe.

There are people in Germany who do point these things out. I mean, mostly now, in fact, almost entirely now, they have to be found within the IFDA. But there are people in the IFTA, who are talking about. about these things. The second is that obviously you have to end the war, you have to stop this constant pressure to keep project Ukraine going. And you've also got to look at the whole European system as well. And again, there are people in Germany who do talk about these things. They are not in power. There are continuing moves in Germany to try to ban the eye of debt. As far as I see, the SPD, which is the junior coalition partner in Mautz's coalition, the SPD, now its main

political strategy is to ban the IFDAQ. I mean, that's, as far as I can see, it's political priority. And, well, Mouth's, at least three years, this coalition will continue unless they're on new elections. I don't know that Germany has three years. What does that mean? You don't know if Germany has three years? Well, I think beyond a certain point, you are going to reach the point of no return. There are many people who think that Germany has already passed it.

I think a little more optimistically that if there was a decisive change now, things could be turned round. but time is very, very short. And if in three years' time, if we're still here, if we still see this decline continue and accelerate over the next three years, let's say there is an IFDA government in three years time, there's very little perhaps at that point that it can realistically do. German industry will be so undermined by that point that any industrial system in Germany will become almost impossible to set up, and we'll have

a Germany that is another massively heavily indebted, service-based economy, incredibly low growth, poor jobs, little prospects, and locked into the same system of economic decline that we see everywhere else in Europe, except it would be much worse because you could argue that in some ways it's Germany in Europe that has been propping everything else up, and that prop will have gone. Now, I ought to say it's not just energy that is the problem, and it's not just cutting off gas. I mean, there are other things. I think Germany recklessly over-invested in the so-called green transition. I'm not going to get into a debate about that. But what I will say is this, and it's a point we've discussed in many, many programs going back many years and which I have

been writing about even longer, which is the Germany became incredibly complacent. It didn't invest in new technologies. The German industrial system stagnated at a certain technological level. They lost their positions in aerospace, computing, all kinds of things. They never developed new sectors like, you know, the tech. We have no tech companies in Germany like you have in the United States. There's no German Google. There's no German Facebook. There's nothing like that.

Nothing like that has ever been established in Germany that would. succeed, no German social media to speak of. So you are also having to fight, a new German government would have to fight against this extraordinary immobilism and stagnation in Germany that has been a major problem for a very, very long time, and which Angela Merkel's political immobilism are massively intensified. So there are lots of problems for Germans to deal with. And I don't really see much sign that anybody in Germany has the political strength or the vision to turn it around. If that vision exists, it comes from the IFD.

And as I said, much of the political class, certainly the SPD looks to be working overtime to find some excuse to ban it. Yeah, Bannavde and all they talk about is war. Exactly. Exactly. Well, they've just increased the amount of money they're giving to Ukraine every year from 9 billion euros to 11. And they gave another 40 million to Ukraine's energy industry, which is undergoing a massive scandal at this very moment.

So there you have it. Yeah, all right. We will end the video there. The durand.locals.com. We are on Rumble and Telegram and X, and we are also on Substack. There is a link to our Substack in the description box down below. Take care.