It hurts to be Merz
Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz is emerging as the most shamelessly pro-Trump leader in Europe—right in the heart of a country where roughly 85% of the population can't stand the fat orange baboon.
Yet here we are: Merz in the Oval Office, nodding along like an obedient schoolboy, while Trump threatens to embargo Spain entirely over base access and Iran strike qualms and disses Keir Starmer.
WTF is going on, Germany? Why the desire to put on the poodle costume and simper appreciatively over Operation Epic Furry?
This isn't diplomacy; it's pure survival instinct dressed up as realpolitik. Merz is just back from China, where he came to the understandable conclusion that Germans "need to work harder," ditch fantasies of the four-day week, and forget the endless "work-life balance" seminars in order to go toe-to-toe with an industrial giant that's willing to grind Germany and Europe into the dust.
He's not wrong—Germany's industrial engine is sputtering—thanks to decades of being hacked by Kremlin-backed green virtue-signalling, leftist welfarism, and the boomer infatuation with early retirement. They can't even clean up the graffiti that tags almost every wall in Germany now, And, yes, the trains definitely do not run on time.
Meanwhile the crown jewel of German industry, the auto industry, is so far up shit creek it has to go on Temu to buy a new paddle.
This industry accounts for around a million jobs, yet it's on life support. Volkswagen's China market share has collapsed (from 24% to 11%) in recent years, pushed down by Chinese makers like BYD, Geely, and Chery. Meanwhile these same Chinese brands have doubled their slice of the European market in 2025. It's not just cars. Germany shed 120,000 industrial jobs just last year.
This industry accounts for around a million jobs, yet it's on life support. Volkswagen's China market share has collapsed (from 24% to 11%) in recent years, pushed down by Chinese makers like BYD, Geely, and Chery. Meanwhile these same Chinese brands have doubled their slice of the European market in 2025. It's not just cars. Germany shed 120,000 industrial jobs just last year.
A major part of Germany's earlier success was cheap energy, but those days are long gone. Now Germany boasts some of the highest industrial electricity prices on the planet—nearly triple America's. This is thanks to the decades-long, Russian-orchestrated Green movement, the closure of nuclear plants, and then the inevitable loss of Russian gas after Putin went mad and invaded Ukraine.
When the Nord stream pipeline supplying cheap Kremlin gas went down, Berlin responded by constructing several major LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) terminals practically overnight. The catch is that now around 96% of the LNG flowing through those shiny new facilities is American, with a big fat leering image of Donald Trump on every shipment.
With the Gulf now in chaos and shipping lanes disrupted by the Iran conflict, that U.S. gas is the only thing keeping the lights on in German factories.
US trade is another Merz worry. The U.S. is Germany's second-largest trading partner, with €240 billion in two-way flows last year. Thanks to the Trump tariffs, however, German auto exports to America dropped 18% in 2025.
A full-blown trade war with Washington would be economic seppuku.
So, when Trump, right in front of Merz in the Oval Office, vowed to "cut off all trade with Spain" for refusing base access and criticizing strikes, Merz knew what he had to do. Namely, get down on all fours and don the Epic Fury furry poodle costume.
No Carney-style lectures on multilateralism here. On Iran itself, Merz's stance is pure lap-dog, calling for jihad against the Ayatollahs. While Spain's Sánchez insists any base agreement "must operate within the framework of international law," and Keir Starmer reluctantly allows "defensive use" of UK facilities (so as to not piss off UK Muslims too much), Merz signs up completely for Trump's Israeli-inspired terrorist war and Pollyanna project of "regime change" falling from the sky.
Let's be clear, Merz, like any other relatively sane and intelligent human being of his background, has nothing but total contempt and loathing for Donald Trump. But the German economy is mired in its fourth straight year of industrial contraction, while its society is facing an aging population, a shrinking workforce, ballooning welfare commitments, and an immigration fiasco that's gift-wrapping Bundestag seats for the AfD.
Merz's CDU-SPD coalition government is as fragile as a glass bubble, and is under constant threat from the "Kremlinshoe" parties of the Greens and the AfD. Without American LNG, things would be hopeless, so even though 85% of Germans hate Trump, with Merz it's very much a case of "epic furry" and poodle love.
This is hard-nosed realpolitik to buy time, but it will play badly with German voters, who, like voters anywhere, are largely idiots because they don't read articles like this one.
This is hard-nosed realpolitik to buy time, but it will play badly with German voters, who, like voters anywhere, are largely idiots because they don't read articles like this one.
Yet again, we see the grand project of European unity and EU power reduced to temporary national and party political interests. This is why the EU remains utterly incapable of alignment when it actually counts.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
If Merz wore a Pickelhaube Trump would take him more seriously
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