Friedrich Merz is the Most Incompetent Chancellor the Federal Republic Has Ever Seen

You need to know that Germany is presently governed by a completely incompetent moron named Friedrich Merz.

He is the least capable Chancellor the Federal Republic has had since her founding in 1949.

His spirit animal is the pigeon.

During the election, it was common to hear anxiety about Merz’s (former) ties to the multinational investment company known as BlackRock, but it turns out that does not matter at all. Merz is not a problem because he’s a corrupt former banker. He’s a problem because he’s a total idiot. So far, his idiocy has had some self-limiting properties, which is I guess the silver lining of idiocy, but there’s no guarantee things will stay that way. This man is an unforced error factory and there is no telling how badly he may screw up. He could draw NATO into a direct war with Russia, convince Trump to slap a 1000% tariff on our automobiles or accidentally summon hostile intergalactic aliens to our atmosphere.

Merz’s incompetence has just visited upon the Federal Republic a political farce the likes of which I have never seen before, and which especially the Anglophone press is not going to tell you the full truth about. (I have noticed that the foreign press covers our politics far more gently than they should, probably out of misplaced pity for us.) This farce exceeds all prior Merz screwups both in terms of sheer pointlessness and in how easy it should have been to avoid.

First, the standard prologue:

Almost all of Merz’s upscrewery is downstream from his original screwup, namely his January flirtations with Alternative für Deutschland, followed by his rapid retreat from the AfD (protesting leftoids are scary!) and his profession of renewed unshakeable faith in that bizarre German political religion known as the firewall. This put Merz and the Union parties in the terrible position of having no coalition alternative to the Social Democrats (SPD). It turns out that when you preemptively destroy all of your negotiating leverage you get led around by the nose, which is exactly what has been happening to Merz and his merry band of Unionoids since February. The SPD, despite suffering their largest electoral defeat in history, are the dominant partner in the present government. The Union are forever slinking around like a henpecked husband, tiptoeing so as not to piss off the shrill screeching socialists who have become especially rabid after losing all of their more moderate supporters to the AfD and the CDU. The firewall is a magical machine that causes German politics to shift left whenever the Bundestag shifts right; it is amazing how that works, you almost wonder who designed the thing.

Anyway, one of the things the Bundestag has to do, is periodically elect new justices to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. These justices wear pseudohistorical red robes designed to recall the Prussian judiciary and they decide on matters of constitutional importance.

The time has come to appoint three new justices to this court, and for the present government this is an incredibly delicate matter. This is because these elections require a two-thirds supermajority of the Bundestag, and two-thirds of the Bundestag are very hard to achieve with all of the firewalling going on. On the one hand, the CDU and CSU have a firewall against Die Linke, or the crazy Left Party; on the other hand and as stated above they have a firewall against the AfD. Because the AfD and Die Linke together command a bit more than one-third of the Bundestag seats, there is strictly speaking no way for the Union parties to elect anybody to the Federal Constitutional Court without violating some firewall or other.1

Now, any reasonable person would have dismantled these firewalls within about five minutes of the last elections, because they are plainly contrary to the requirements of routine governance. Merz and his clique of unusual geniuses, however, instead worked out a Third And Not At All Moronic Path, according to which they pledge to avoid all AfD votes like the fascist plague that they are, while angling to receive some number of Linke votes and arguing to their lobotomised constituents that voting with Die Linke in this case is not a violation of the firewall because they are at any rate and very ostentatiously not “talking” with Die Linke. They are only texting them, or emailing them, or however it is these votes have to be coordinated. That is how dumb this is, and still I am just setting things up for you.

Given that the self-proclaimed “democratic parties” of the cartel do not have enough votes to appoint any justice, the CDU and the SPD would have been well advised to pick the most boring candidates available. Absolute blank nobodies should have been the order of the day. The CDU nominated one guy named Robert Seegmüller, but the Greens and the SPD didn’t like him, so they went maximum boring with their second choice, a labour justice named Günter Spinner. The SPD, by contrast, did not feel any need to stay boring. They nominated two hyphenated crazy women named Ann-Katrin Kaufhold and Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf.

Both are very bad news, but the excessively named Brosius-Gersdorf, a law professor at Potsdam, has a particularly noxious record. She’s spoken in favour of mandating Covid vaccines, of imposing gender-neutral language upon our entire Basic Law and of banning Alternative für Deutschland. As if that were not enough, Brosius-Gersdorf served on a government commission last year where she argued in favour of liberalising our abortion laws. In Europe, abortion is more heavily restricted than in the United States, and in Germany it is still mostly criminalised. This is a serious issue within the nominally Christian CDU and the CSU parties.

Merz, having failed behind the scenes to get the SPD to nominate halfway serviceable candidates for Germany’s highest court, at least ought to have done the next-best thing, namely say as little about Kaufhold and Brosius-Gersdorf as possible and dispute at every opportunity the suggestion that they might be crazy leftoids. All the man had to do was keep his head down, get past today’s vote, and then he gets a long holiday. But Merz could not do that, because he is an idiot. This brings us to his most central screwup.

On Wednesday in the Bundestag, Beatrix von Storch of the AfD had an opportunity to put a question to Chancellor Merz, and she pressed the issue of Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy:

I ask you: can you in good conscience vote for Ms Brosius-Gersdorf, who does not believe that human dignity applies to people who have not yet been born? Ms Brosius-Gersdorf has said that a nine-month-old foetus has no human dignity two minutes before birth. Can you in good conscience vote for this woman, knowing that she will probably soon vote to abolish Section 218 [i.e., our abortion criminalising statute]?

Merz should have recognised this as a dangerous moment. Brosius-Gersdorf was already stirring controversy in the press, and if I am not mistaken, von Storch’s question provoked a few claps from within Merz’s own CDU/CSU faction. Either Merz did not realise this or he didn’t care – it is always hard to tell which one it is when you are dealing with an idiot. With a look of triumph and after some prefatory AfD bashing, he said: “My simple answer to your question here is: Yes.” He looked to the CDU benches, feeling that he had properly owned that obnoxious AfD woman. Instead there was nothing but stunned silence, then a smattering of pro forma claps. Merz had implicitly endorsed von Storch’s characterisation of Brosius-Gersdorf as a rabidly pro-abortion candidate and thrown his support behind her.

The shitshow formed literally within hours. CDU representatives began to tell the press they would vote against Brosius-Gersdorf’s nomination; German Catholic bishops spoke against her candidacy. While Merz was in Rome having his picture taken at the deeply pointless Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 …

… his own government was slipping into crisis. CDU leadership were lecturing backbenchers that failure to support the SPD judicial candidates might pull the coalition apart. This morning, Merz returned to a fully developed disaster. His triumphant “Ja!” in the Bundestag on Wednesday had united great swathes of his own party against him and he could no longer guarantee the SPD their supermajority.

To really perfect this failure, Merz and his troupe of pink leotard-sporting circus acrobats needed to mess up one more time. To avoid offending the SPD, they cast about for some figleaf reason to justify their withdrawal of support that did not extend to ideological matters. They poked around on Twitter and found that the famous Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber had discovered irregularities in Brosius-Gersdorf’s doctoral dissertation. Specifically, he had shown that it has substantial overlap with her husband’s postdoctoral thesis, written around the same time. Citing the “plagiarism allegations” against Brosius-Gersdorf, the CDU asked the SPD to set aside the vote on Brosius-Gersdorf’s candidacy.

This was worse than just telling the SPD that the abortion thing made Brosius-Gersdorf a no-go candidate. First, the SPD have themselves been stung by Weber’s research in the past and they hate the man. Second, among those many other politicians whom Weber has accused of plagiarism is Friedrich Merz himself. Third, Weber also seems to hate the CDU, and within hours of the CDU announcement, he clarified that he was not accusing Brosius-Gersdorf of plagiarising anything (how the parallel passages in her doctoral thesis emerged, he pointed out, is uncertain) and he took the opportunity to call Merz a plagiarist again, and also to call the CDU Minister President of Thüringen a plagiarist, and generally to make everything as awkward as possible for the Union.

Mercifully, the pace of events intervened and the CDU were never forced to respond to these painfully embarrassing developments. After some brief Bundestag debate, which featured furious SPD and Green representatives ranting about the misogyny of plagiarism detectors and the nefarious influence of right-wing media, the entire vote was cancelled. They’ll try to hold it again after the summer holiday in September, when they may well have another huge fight. It does not bode well that the SPD have so far refused to abandon their nomination of Brosius-Gersdorf.