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[–] 22 points 7 hours ago* (2 children)

Imagine your program being "Fuck the people. They are lazy free-loaders anyway. We need to demolish social security to make the rich richer!" and your reaction to every new low of approval being "We need to stay on our course until all those idiots finally understand our genius!" and you have an accurate picture of Friedrich Merz and his government.

Now combine this with the fact that Merz took over the party lead with the explicit goal to half the far-right AfD's numbers (~10% back then) but instead spend all his time parroting their talking points (because the voters you lose to the far-right will totally come back if you aim to be a bad copy of the extremists they voted for...) thus making them now stand at ~28% in polls. All while his party also got completely eliminated from parliament in a recent state election by missing the required 5%, a historical first time ever achievement. So his own party (and the remaining voters) aren't thrilled either...

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    It’s amazing how similar this sounds like 100 years ago. Or how similar it is to every pro austerity politician ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 minutes ago*

    Or how similar it is to every pro austerity politician ever.

    Oh, I forgot one of the highlights as it happened right in the beginning of Merz' tenure. They loudly campaigned on no new debts of course while everyone else agreed that some will be needed (after decades of investment backlog caused by his party). Then they took on an historic amount of debt for investments into defense, the economy and infrastructure the moment they won the elctions... and wasted it all on tax cuts and similiar bullshit while actually investing even less in the crumbling infrastructure than their cash-strapped predecessors did.

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