The Duran Podcast - Merz obsessed with Russia, economy in deep trouble, AfD surges

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

Merz obsessed with Russia, economy in deep trouble, AfD surges

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in Germany. Once again, we did a video on Germany about a week, a week and a half ago. And here we are talking about Germany again. This time we have the Aye of De as, without a doubt, the most popular party in Germany. And Mertz is in big trouble on multiple fronts. So what does he do? He travels to the United States, and he doubles down on Germany's support of Zelensky and Project Ukraine. That's Mertz's number one.

concern without a doubt. He doesn't care about Germany whatsoever. He is completely absorbed and committed to Zelensky and project Ukraine. Anyway, your thoughts on what is going on in Germany. You know, it's so interesting that you said this because, of course, this is exactly the same with Kirstorma, even as the political situation in Britain disintegrates and the labor government's position disintegrates and the economy in Britain goes further and deeper into effective recession. I mean, virtually everybody can see that it is in reality in resertion. Kier Stama focuses mostly on foreign policy, mostly on project Ukraine. He's there embracing Zelensky.

He's hugging Zelensky outside Downing Street. And there's mutterings and complaints that Stama is a prime minister who's only interested in foreign policy. The same thing is happening in Germany, though it's an even faster speed because Germany has further to fall. So Germany's economy is in recession. It's been a continuous recession, by the way, for the last three years. The economy continues to contract. Living standards are continuing to fall. The economic situation is deteriorating. Debt is ballooning. The deindustrialization continues at an ever more rapid pace. There are tensions within the coalition. And we'll come to all of those in the moment because the and the CDU loathe each other and they hate each other even more than, say, the Free Democrats and the SPD did and the Greens did during Olaf Schultz's coalition.

This is an even less happy coalition than that one was. And Mertz focuses on Project Ukraine and people in Germany are now publicly muttering that he is a chancellor who's only interested in foreign policy, that he's not really interested in the underlying problems of Germany itself. And that, again, is also true. It's strange how eerily similar the situation between Stama and Mertz actually is. But Germany, in some respects, is an even more important country because it is the motor of the European economy.

If the motor stops, the whole European project basically stops. And to repeat again, Germany is in deep recession. The car industry is in serious trouble. The 15% tariffs that the US has imposed have been a further blow. Talk about further sanctions against Russia would be, I suspect, a terminal blow, which doesn't, of course, stop Mertz advocating them. And the other major problem is the coalition that he has established, because Mertz came to the leadership of the CDU as the leader who was going to bring the CDU back to its roots

as a right of centre, conservative Christian party that was going to embrace more traditional positions on family and on social issues, that was going to support small business people, that was going to take a more free market approach to the economy, that was going to clamp down more on immigration into Germany, that was going to, Mertz was going to be a break with Merkel's style of leading the CDU, which was always to position the CDU in the liberal centre.

He was going to bring it back to its roots. He was going to re-energize that party more in that direction. So what does he do instead? He goes into coalition with the Social Democrats, the SPD, the left of centre party, in Germany. The social Democrats are having the same kind of crisis. They have also distanced themselves from their political roots. They therefore are seeking to take more left-wing positions. So they are embracing more liberal positions on social questions. They support a appointment of a justice to the Constitutional Court, who takes very liberal positions about abortion, for

example. They want stronger worker protections, more welfare spending. They're demanding a more left-wing program for the government to take. And Metz is on balance closer to what you're what the SPD is demanding than what the conservatives in the CDU had been expecting from him. So you're starting to see growing resentment of maths within the CDU. They're saying, this man isn't really the conservative that we imagined him to be. He's not making the break with Merkelism that he told us that he was. On the contrary, what we're getting from maths is Merkelism on steroids. We're getting more of Merkel's welfareist, socialist, social democratic type policies.

And at the same time, we are ballooning debt. Merkel at least kept debt levels in Germany under control. But with Matt's debt instead is exploding. And no wonder that the IFDA, which is indeed positioning itself as the real right-wing party, taking the place which we in the CDU used to have, no wonder the IFDA is growing in strength all the time, has now overtaken us as the main party on the right, something which has, which has, has never happened before in post-war, post-second World War, German history. And the reason it is doing that is because of the stance that Mertz focused as he is on foreign policy, obsessed as he is

with Ukraine, anxious to keep the coalition together, refusing to have anything to do with the IFD, because the IFD recognizes that the war with Russia is turning into a disaster for Germany. He refuses to have anything to do with that. So he's become a prisoner of the SPD and they're pulling him further and further to the left, which is not where his party expected that he would want to go. So this is the situation in Germany now. How long is this going to last for March? I don't think much.

I don't think for very long. I mean, you know, in Germany, governments tend to be extremely stable. the political system is almost constructed to make a collapse of a government very difficult. I mean, this is partly the legacy of the 1920s. You know, people remember how unstable the 1920s were and they want to preserve stability. They wanted to preserve stability at all costs. So they created a system where governments would, it would. would be, it was difficult for governments to fall. And until very recently, by the way,

difficult for governments to lose elections. It's a fact that most people don't know. But it was very rare for a government in Germany to be simply voted out of power. I mean, that was the Germany that I remember. But we are in different times now. And I don't think this could continue for very long. I'm guessing that if the situation continues to deteriorate at the rate it is doing, by the end of this year, we will start to see growing unrest within the CDU. And we're probably going to start to see public demands that mouths stand down and that the coalition arrangement be broken and that the SCDUs either tries to go it alone as a minority. government or perhaps horror of horrors enters into some kind of coalition arrangement with the

IFTA. They'll never do that. No, I know. They will never do that. So if they go it alone as a minority government, wouldn't that necessitate elections, call for elections eventually? I mean, there are other suggestions that they go into coalition with the Greens. That sounds incredible, but I mean, you know, there are people within the Green Party who are talking

about this. By the way, let's just talk about the Greens because, of course, the Greens have been in many ways the prime architects of Germany's disaster in Schultz's time, even though they were the second, I mean, the coalition, they were the junior coalition party. They were the dominant party in the coalition. I mean, they basically shaped the policy. They shaped the policy towards Russia. They shaped the policy towards Ukraine. They shaped the policy towards European integration. And they were the major drivers in Germany's rather extraordinary energy policies as well, closing down the nuclear power plants and doing all of those things. The Greens lost support during the election, not as big much as the SPD did or the Free Democrats did, but they did lose

a significant amount of support. Now, the Greens, as soon as that happens, the usual thing with the leaders of parties that fail, Harbeck and Berbock have walked away. So Harbeck is now apparently going to Denmark. He's not going to even stay in Germany anymore. So he's leaving. I'm not even sure what he's going to do in Denmark.

But he's no longer, interested in leading the Greens. Bearbok has gone to New York, where she's president of the General Assembly. Heavens knows how that happened, but anyway, she is. So she's got herself a cushy number in New York. So the Greens have been left leaderless, and there's a big battle within the Greens

as to which direction he should go to. So there's always this argument in the Greens between the so-called realists, Bebock, Habek, those sort of people, and the so-called fundis, the people who believe in the pure unadulterated

policy lines that the Greens once were identified with. So, the latest arguments being made by the so-called more realist faction of the Greens is let's actually

become the centrist party in Germany again. And then when the current coalition collapses, we can go into coalition with the CDU. It sounds incredible, but there are people apparently in the Greens who are actually talking in that way. I can't imagine that myself.

I myself think if the coalition does collapse, we probably will have a period of minority government. The CDU will try to go it alone, or somebody in the CDU will try to go it alone. It'll have very great difficulty. keeping government going and legislating and doing those sort of things. But then in a sense, we don't really have government in Germany today anymore anyway, because given how split and divided the coalition is and how deep mounts its focus is on foreign policy, on Ukraine, on project Ukraine, you could argue.

that what we have in Germany anyway is administration rather than government, because other than spending lots and lots of money, it's such as if, and that actually has much in the way of a program. I read a really interesting analysis of the state of Germany in a rather interesting magazine, by the way, which is called Eurointelligence, just a second. And they said that Germany does not have a true economic plan about how to restructure its economy or to raise productivity. And the problem right across Europe is that productivity is either stagnant or in some places

even falling. There's no real plans on how to update or even digitalize the European economies. Forget about AI or anything like that. They're not even reached first base on AI. I mean, you know, we're talking in Germany about a government, a public sector where parts of it still use fax machines. It sounds incredible, but it's actually true. I know people who work in, you know, state institutions in Germany, and they confirm to me that it's true. So, I mean, you know, they haven't really got anywhere ready to do any of that yet.

And Mertz has no plan to do it. So, Germany is locked into a situation where it's administration rather than government. So you could argue that if the coalition collapses and the CDU goes it alone and they administer Germany rather than govern it. It's no different from what we have already. Yeah. Merz is completely absorbed with the project Ukraine. That's for sure.

Germany also looks like it's prepared to sign up to Ursula's Eurobonds strategy, which is laid out in the EU budget. Yes. And it looks like Germany, which under Merkel, they absolutely refused to do it. Yes. And they stopped the whole idea of the European Union going into debt as a union. Merkel was absolutely against this, rightly so. Yes. Mertz seems like he's ready to go along with this in order to keep the spending going.

Absolutely. That'll sink Germany. It will sink Germany. It will sink Germany. I mean, it will say, absolutely. As well as other countries. Absolutely. So, I mean, Germany's own deficits are ballooning and it's now going to share its credit card essentially with everyone else.

I mean, it's, what we are going to get is ballooning debt across Europe. across Europe. And the thing to understand is that all of this money is not going to go into productive, real productive purposes, you know, trying to support the industries or things of that kind. Anybody who thinks that is deluding themselves. I mean, I was getting, I was reading an article about Spain and the Spanish economy, the state of the Spanish economy, and people are talking Again, a lot of discussions about how well Spain has been doing over the last couple of years under Sanchez. Productivity is flat in Germany. The reason there's apparent growth in Germany is, again, it's all based around public spending, much of it on welfare.

You mean in Spain? In Spain, in Spain. Much of it is on welfare, exactly. That's all of Southern Europe, though. It's all of southern Europe. Greece is the same. Oh, we're doing so well. But it's, yeah, it's not the case.

All you have to do is visit the country, visit the cities. And you understand that these are cities of decay. These are countries of decay. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, inevitably, I suppose, it was inevitable that what began in the periphery would eventually reach the center. And what's now happening is that Euro decay,

is now reaching the center, which is Germany itself. I began to see the signs some years ago, actually. Yeah. Just the final question, how come, or if IEFDE gets an election, say they manage to get the election. And AFDE, if you go by the polling numbers, I mean, they're ahead. But it's not enough for them to govern on their own. So who would they go into coalition with or how would that work? That is a massive, that is a massive.

question. I mean, logically, the party they should go into coalition with is the CDU. I think there are some people in the CDU who might say, okay, let's do that. But of course, an awful lot of others would say, no way, hell would freeze over before we would be prepared to do that. So there's a real risk that the CDU could split, in which case an IFDALED government might not have a majority or would be very unstable itself. I mean, it's very difficult to be optimistic about Germany looking forward. The damage, and again, I want to say this, the damage that Merkelism has done to Germany is, I think, so profound and so little understood even today by people. By the way, I mean, Merkelism, which is an expression, you would have first found on the Duran. You remember we were

saying this years ago. People are now talking about Merkelism. It's now becoming an accepted noun, if I can put it like this, but an accepted label for a certain style and period in German history. But anyway, the damage it has done, the erosion it has caused in Germany's productive and institutional systems is so profound that I'm not sure that there is a way back. If when Merkel left, there'd been a strong, clever, decisive, forceful leader within the the CDU itself, and it could only have come from the CDU, who could have turned the situation in Germany round, well, the damage might have been avoided. Part of the damage that Merkel did is that she made sure that no one like that would ever appear within the CDU.

Because one of the things she constantly did was whenever it looked like somebody might appear within the CDU as a potential rival, she made certain that she always destroyed him. Yeah, she did a lot of damage not only to Germany, but don't. all of Europe. Absolutely. All right, we will end the video there. The durand.orgals.com. We are on X and Telegram and Rumble and go to the Duran Shop, pick up some merch, like what we are wearing in this video update.

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