The Duran Podcast - Germany's Merz, debt brake gone and removing AfD

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Germany's Merz, debt brake gone and removing AfD

All right, Alexander. Let's talk about the situation in Germany. It looks like we're getting a clear picture as to Mertz's administration, the people that will be in his administration. Annalina will not be in the government. So I guess that's what positive. If you could take a positive away out of this, Pistorius, I believe, is slated to become the defense minister.

And then you have a lot of loyalists, I guess, to Mertz and to the CTO who are going to fill out the imported positions in his soon-to-be administration. Mertz, the man that is positioning himself as a hardliner, as someone who is going to position Germany to go to war with Russia, not to not to deter Russia, but to actually go to war with Russia. That's what he's positioning Germany as, and to lead Europe into a war with Russia, someone who has removed the debt break for infrastructure spending and for military spending. This is the Mertz Agenda. This is what he is preparing Germany for as the country, as the country of Germany is de-industrialized and is now ready to to refinancialize or to financialize, I guess,

in Black Rock tradition. Is that even a word to refinancialize it to financialize? That's the Mertz plan. Your thoughts on Mertz and his new administration or his administration to be. Has this been confirmed, the positions that he's? No, but I'm sure they will be. I mean, His coalition has a majority in the new Bundestag. So I'm sure it will be. He will be Chancellor and he will get his government and it will be very much, as you say. And of course, the thing to understand about this government is that a lot of it looks like the old government. In the sense that though it's now being led by the CDU and the CSU and some of the prominent figures of the past, Robert Habek, Annalina Berbock, Olaf Schultz.

are gone, a lot of the others are still there because the CDU-CSU has gone into coalition with the SPD. The SPD formed the previous coalition, but they're still there in this one. They will have seven ministers, apparently, including, I believe, the finance ministry. So they're in a very, very strong position within the new government. Storius, who was the defense minister before, is the defense minister again. So there's an awful lot of overlap between this new Mets government and the failed Schultz government that we just had. And by the way, if we talk about the SPD, the most extraordinary thing about the SPD is that this is a rapidly declining party in Germany today. It's Germany's oldest party.

It has a history going all the way back to the 19th century. It used to be, by the way, the party in Germany in the 19th century that was supported by Karl Marx, just saying it was a radical revolutionary party, socialist party in those days, but it's had a very, very long history in Germany. For much of German history, it has been Germany's biggest party. it is dwindling away and yet in the last couple of years

it is a permanent fixture now of German governments because though it's getting smaller and smaller and less popular and though it has completely severed itself from its historic roots in Germany's industrial working class it is the party

without which coalitions cannot be formed because the alternative of making a coalition with the IFDA is one which the German political class completely rules out. So the result is that you have a government that looks to a great extent like the previous government. And hearing it, you have a man, Friedrich Meaths, who is extremely ambitious, rather abrasive, gives the impression of being not very bright and not very competent, but also profoundly unprincipled, because of course he runs the CDU, CSU against the Schultz government, wins the election, forms a coalition with Schultz's party. he reverses the debt break.

And can we just say clearly that the debt break is gone? I mean, they talk about infrastructure spending and armament spending as being the exceptions. But the reality is that what they're now going to start doing is that they're going to allocate any kind of spending as infrastructure spending or armament spending. So the debt break, in theory, it may still be there, but it's in effect gone.

The opposite of what Mets said during the election and before the election. So the debt break is gone. He's going to press forward with his programs of spending and financialization. But the CDU voters, many of them conservatives, looked at that. They didn't like it because they didn't like either the policy, which has didn't. different from what they'd been led to expect. They didn't like the way it was done, bringing back the old parliament, the one that had just been voted out of office, out of existence in order to pass this change because there wasn't

the majority in the new parliament. He's now done this deal, as I said, with the SPD. They don't like him. And I have never seen in German history a chancellor lose support in the SPD in the Senate. Germany so quickly. So he won the election with 28% of the support of the German electorate, very low historically by the standards of the CDU-CSU. He's now fallen apparently to 24%. He is personally unpopular. And the leading party in Germany today is the IFDA. And if you look at the polls, you see that more and more Germans think that Germany is.

is on the wrong direction. They don't have any confidence that what Mouths is doing is going to work, and they're absolutely right. It isn't going to work. It's leading Germany into completely the wrong direction. And you see the first rumblings of discontent within the CDU. You see Minister-Presidents of East German states, Saxony and Turingia, now saying, well, for heaven's set, we've got to say,

sort things out with the Russians. We've got to get natural gas from Russia flowing again. Of course, Mets absolutely rejects that. But I wonder how long this position can last. And I'm going to make a prediction. I do that this government is going to last very long either. It certainly won't serve its term. What does that mean? It won't serve its term. Well, it won't. It won't. It won't survive. for the four years. Yeah.

It will break down just as the Schultz government did. And it's, and it's, it will be every bit as unhappy as the Schultz government eventually turned out to be. Especially, there are lots of people in the CDU who don't like Mets. Yeah, but the Schultz government, I agree. The Schultz government, though, should have probably wrapped up about a year ago, a year and a half ago, I mean, but did they manage to keep on going for about, I would say, a year and a half more than they should have.

So if you're Merz, if you're the political establishment in Germany, what you need to do is you need to deal with IFDA. Yes. So that's what they're going to do, right? Absolutely. They can't defeat it politically. They can't argue against it. Because a lot of what the IFDA says is what CDU,

CSU voters support. I mean, it's, it is a right weak conservative party and they're right weak conservatives. So there isn't that huge ideological conflict with the CDUCSU. And you can see that as conservative voters start to become more and more alienated in Western Germany, they're going to start potentially drifting to the IFDF. It is not impossible. So you may find it very difficult to defeat them politically. So that's the first thing. You have no real convincing argument against their foreign policy perspectives because, let's face it, getting natural gas flowing again from Russia would actually work to Germany's advantage. And the war in Ukraine has been lost and is becoming more and more unpopular with German voters. So what you do?

You can't defeat them. You have to eliminate them. You have to destroy them. And anybody who thinks that isn't going to happen in Germany, who thinks that there are protections in the German constitutional system and legal system that will prevent that happening in Germany, I think is mistaken. And I think that is exactly the direction in which Mats and his team are going to go. They just don't seem to have any other option, do they? I mean, if they want to stay in power, and it's not only Mertz. I mean, I think the whole German political class or the majority of the German political class is going to be united in canceling or blocking AFDE.

I mean, Greens, SPD, CDU, all the parties are going to go for this. Yes, absolutely. Especially if there is a drift from the CDU-CSU to the IFDA. it's to the point where in Western Germany, which would be seen as existential, an existential danger, not just to the CDU, CSU, but to the entire Federal Republic of Germany, as we have known it. In other words, the whole political system that was created in Germany after the Second World War, basically from the 1950s. So that is precisely what they will do.

And of course, there'll be a huge amount of rhetoric. There'll be police investigations. There'll be intelligence investigations. There'll be all kinds of things done. Leading up to that event, there will be increasing political tensions within Germany itself. But that, I suspect, is where we're going. All right. What does this mean for Europe, Mertz?

For the EU. For the EU. Yes. Deepening. deepening crisis, especially as the economic situation across Europe darkens. But I'm going to say, I think it's also going to lead to more and more demands from the EU centre, that it be granted more and more powers. So even as the whole thing starts to crack, you will see more pressure to push for ever greater centralisation and ever greater power

to be given by the states to Brussels. And Metz himself apparently can't stand Ursula von der Leyen. They are old-standing enemies. And Metz apparently thinks that he should be in charge of the EU rather than Ursula should. But ultimately, I think that's where he's going to go. I suspect Metz himself will not be Chancellor of Germany for very long, but the EU structures, the central structures in Brussels, will remain. And as I said, we will see more demands, the power drift towards them. And what you can also see is that in states like Germany and other places where you could argue, they would be arguments that there might be domestic constitutional or legal restraints,

preventing crackdowns on groups like the IFDA. How do you get around that? You get some kind of regulation passed in Brussels. The European Court of Justice then says that EU law takes precedence over national or constitutional law. So you get yourself the legal mechanisms to ban parties like the IFDA, passed in Brussels by the European Parliament and the European Commission, that way overriding any restraints that might exist in Germany itself because of the constitutional systems there. All right.

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