When it comes to the causes of Germany’s collapse, there is an iron silence in both corporate boardrooms and political circles. They have made themselves comfortable in the green subsidy Valhalla. Meanwhile, the chancellor shows satisfaction with his policies, clinging faithfully to the communication patterns of the past.
From a media-political perspective, Friedrich Merz resembles a dinosaur. His understanding of media work follows the routines of the 1990s. If a deficit opens in the social insurance system, Merz loudly demands budget cuts. If an industry falls into crisis, a “summit” is supposed to provide healing. Coalition conflicts are resolved on camera over a beer. This is sluggish communication aimed at an increasingly disinterested audience -- an attempt to suppress the painful symptoms of a failed political agenda that has grown far beyond the ability of politics to manage.
Smiling and Self-satisfied
And so, on Friday morning, the chancellor declared himself fundamentally content with his government’s decisions -- cheerful, upbeat, and self-absorbed. Only communication, according to Merz on “CDU.TV,” left something to be desired. True to the motto: if there is no political substance, at least the style should appear harmonious and well-mannered.
The chancellor, who just months ago declared that he had “taken over the country,” thus awarded himself a glowing report card. Why should he care about the actual state of the nation, which from both an economic and domestic perspective must already be described as systemically fragile?
Domestically, Merz has already failed on the facts created by the German party-state: unrestrained migration and the ideological reprogramming of the economy. Abroad, his main achievement is finding money for the proxy war in Ukraine and occasionally playing tourist in Kyiv in a casual outfit for the cameras. Merz embodies a chancellor from a bygone era when everything still seemed controllable. In today’s world, his role-playing appears clumsy, directionless, and utterly lacking the strategic foresight our time demands.
Germany has no Elites
Merz faces no serious resistance within society because Germany lacks credible elites. A true elite -- in politics or business -- would grasp the larger trajectory of policy, comprehend the central questions of societal progress in depth, and present them to the public for sober deliberation.
Criticism of elites is not limited to their silence on ecological socialism, which has been unleashed on society like a plague. The ethical foundation of a true elite must include rigorous analysis of conflicts and problematic developments. Ask yourself why in Germany -- and indeed in all of Europe -- there is not even the beginning of a public debate about our monetary system and its systemic destruction of purchasing power.
Monetary policy operates largely in the shadows, and rarely does the truth about political leadership come into such stark light as with Ursula von der Leyen’s utter failure in trade negotiations with the United States. The geostrategic future of the EU lies in the hands of dilettantes and ideologically blinkered amateurs.
A true elite would seek to position Germany in the reordering world with the BRICS nations, open trade routes, and disentangle the fatal involvement in the proxy war in Ukraine. None of this is happening.
Half-knowledge on an Odyssey
And yet the pressure from the streets is slowly reaching Berlin. Exploding insolvencies are already leaving scars on the labor market and social funds -- and will soon carve a path of devastation through public budgets.
In municipalities that have suffered most from the infantile transformation policies -- think of Stuttgart, once the heart of the German auto industry -- local coffers are already exhausted.
On Friday, Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder demanded a “small revolution”: the return of the internal combustion engine. At the same time, however, he insisted on continuing e-mobility subsidies. Söder has not grasped what is truly at stake -- his job, and the future of his own children.
He is the best example of the elite problem: they vaguely perceive the connections but consistently draw the wrong conclusions, being too deeply enmeshed in the networks of Brussels, Berlin, and the power machinery of lobby interests.
The Welfare Entrepreneur
Take the lobbyists of the solar industry -- or, more broadly, the green transformation crash economy. Here again we see corporatism: the tight fusion of political and business leaders into a common-interest cartel. It is a historical, recurring phenomenon, usually marking the final chapter of social and economic cycles. The motto: grab what you can, and to hell with what comes after -- après moi, le déluge!
True elites create value through their own actions -- without siphoning off anonymous funds through political promises or the coercive machinery of the state.
The EU’s green policy has produced the subsidy entrepreneur. At heart, this political player resembles a welfare recipient -- dependent on public handouts, seeing society only as the paymaster for his useless activity. He produces no goods or services demanded by the market and thus never attains the status of an economic elite, which must legitimize itself through performance and success.
Preparing for the Aftermath
Perhaps some still remember the coffee party that the Chancellor styled as an “investment summit,” where 61 German CEOs gathered for a photo op with him. Packaged by the media as “Made for Germany,” it was in truth a symbol of the corporatist status quo. Everything staged for effect, no one daring to slaughter one of politics’ golden calves -- like the Green Deal -- to signal a real restart.
A real investment summit would have to exclude politics. It would bring together leading corporations and -- ideally -- medium-sized businesses (which barely exist in Germany) to draw up a clear list of demands and put pressure on policymakers. Germany’s economy has long passed the point of no return. A crisis is inevitable, no matter what reforms are attempted now.
The timid complaints of Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius or the IGBCE chemical union about high energy costs do nothing to change this. They shy away from naming the real cause: the green transformation and unrestrained eco-socialism that is paralyzing the country.
Entrepreneurs could, however, perform a decisive service by already sketching the economic framework for the post-crisis era -- just as the Bretton Woods system was created even before World War II ended.
That framework is simple: Germany must recommit to free markets and private property, moving toward a minimal state that renounces interventionism and ideological steering.
The importance of excluding politics -- prone as it is to ideological excess and intellectual reductionism of economic complexity -- from designing this framework, and limiting it only to execution, is proven by the catastrophe into which these ideologues have already plunged us.
Image: Michael Lucan