Knowing that Trump has sexual dirt on Macron, considering that a trio of pretty boys from Yuckraine have set two of Keir Starmer's homes and a former car on fire, and that MERZ is doing Hitler's impression by launching a new German army in Lithuania — and not forgetting that Trump was a dedicated "pussy-grabber" — we should be proud of the state of the Western World leadership.

It you feel that shit floats — especially after the Joe Biden sudden revelations he had not had a PSA test since 1914, and that his mental acuity was 120 per cent till that famous "Joe, you did very well, you answered all the questions" debate with Donald — you would be wrong, or right. It does not matter. 

The European section of the Western world — run by diplomed CAPITALIST idiots who denied having done a coke run on a train to Kiev, but laughed like school girls sharing stories about their first period, while people were dying on the battlefields of their horrible protégé, MI6 agent Volodymyrrrr Zelenskyyyyyy — is a garden in full bloom....

So who are going to punch in the Gonads tonight?

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be our first idiot of the rank... He is less popular in Germany than a fart in a lift and less appealing than the AfD right-wing political figurehead... They both float on the stagnant sewer with around 20 per cent buoyancy...

Not only that, the lefties in Germany have joined Merz in his quest for the FOURTH REICH...

HERE WE GO:

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Left Party conference hides support for Merz government with left-wing rhetoric
Christoph Vandreier

The recent Left Party conference in Chemnitz has clearly demonstrated its role as the graveyard of every social movement from below. While resolutions and speeches were not short on radical rhetoric aimed at appealing to radicalised young people and workers, they remained deliberately vague in order to cover up the party’s right-wing realpolitik and enable further collaboration with the federal and state governments.

When hundreds of thousands spontaneously took to the streets in February to protest against the cooperation of the current chancellor, Friedrich Merz (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), with the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Left Party was able to benefit from this. Because it was the only party that had not participated in the anti-refugee propaganda and had at least nominally opposed rearmament and war, it not only received over 4 million votes, but also gained tens of thousands of new, mostly young members.

But the Left Party did not mobilise this opposition to fascism and war; it stifled it. When it became clear on election night that Merz, together with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), would form the most right-wing government since Hitler, it did not call for mass demonstrations, but announced it wanted to negotiate cooperation with them. Finally, the party even approved the new government’s €1 trillion rearmament programme in the Bundesrat (upper house of parliament) and then enabled Merz’s swift election as chancellor in the Bundestag (lower house of parliament).

This course was continued at the recent party conference. There had been no new elections of delegates in the run-up to the conference, so the vast majority of members who had only joined in recent months were not represented at all. The meeting of the old delegates was then choreographed from start to finish, so that no serious discussion of any pressing issues could take place.

The conference was repeatedly interrupted by musical acts, and after the main speeches, disco fog was sprayed and the hall bathed in red flashing lights several times. The spectacle was more reminiscent of a village disco in the 1990s than a serious political event under conditions of acute war, genocide in Gaza and historic attacks on wages and jobs.

This was a conscious decision. The festive atmosphere was intended to allow the party executive and presidium to prevent any controversial debate on these issues and to push through resolutions enabling the continuation of their right-wing policies while sounding “left.”

To this end, the “unity” of the party was invoked like a mantra, and the need to focus on certain issues was emphasised.

But this did not include the preparations for war against the nuclear power Russia, the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and the growing conflicts between the imperialist powers. None of the main contributions from the party and parliamentary group leadership even mentioned these central developments. Terms such as Russia, Ukraine, Gaza or world war are also nowhere to be found in the main resolution.

Instead, there was only talk of “rearmament,” which they opposed. However, this “rearmament” was not linked to Germany’s war preparations against Russia or the global ambitions of German imperialism. The Left Party even claimed that the government was pursuing “rearmament for the sake of rearmament,” as if Merz and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) had not openly declared that they want to be capable of winning a war against Russia within three to five years.

While the main motion sidesteps any concrete political developments, it is brimming with left-wing phrases that are in no way concrete or binding. For example, the Left Party repeatedly describes itself as an “organising class party” or a “socialist membership party” that must root itself in the “working class,” etc.

None of this prevents the party leadership from supporting the federal government’s pro-war policies, enabling Merz’s quick election as chancellor, or supporting deportations and social attacks in the federal states. These phrases serve only to tie young people who are looking for a socialist alternative to this thoroughly right-wing party and thus nip genuine resistance in the bud.

This is particularly evident in the resolutions that were tabled on specific issues, most of which had been formally merged by the party executive from several individual motions.

The motion “Without ifs and buts: Say no to rearmament and military preparedness!” sharply criticises the federal government’s war credits, which the Left Party had itself approved in the Bundesrat. 

Unlike at the last conference in Halle, the party now also explicitly opposes “arms deliveries to Ukraine.” Finally, it even states: “The Left Party stands in the tradition of the two anti-militarists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.”

The two great revolutionaries must be turning in their graves. They were known for calling a spade a spade, relentlessly exposing the machinations of German militarism and mobilising the working class against the root cause of war: capitalism.

The Left Party’s resolution, however, makes no mention of NATO’s provocation against Russia, the role of the German government in fuelling the war, or the great power ambitions of the ruling class. Everything is reduced to a general “power struggle between major powers over geopolitical interests, raw materials and markets,” but Germany is not named as one of these major powers. On the contrary, the resolution demands that the country pursue an “independent policy of détente in Europe.”

In doing so, the Left Party is not simply fuelling the illusion that a peaceful world is possible under capitalist conditions and that the ruling class can be persuaded to pursue a “policy of détente.” Rather, the party uses these phrases to integrate itself into the official pro-war politics.

Just three days after the conference, on the Maischberger talk show, party leader Jan van Aken enthusiastically welcomed Chancellor Merz’s trip to Kiev. “It was right that he went to Kiev together with Tusk, Starmer and Macron as his first action,” said van Aken. “That was exactly the right move. We have been saying for three years that more needs to be done for negotiations, and they have finally taken the reins again.” Van Aken was delighted that the four politicians had undermined US President Donald Trump’s dirty deals with Putin.

After supporting the quick election of the new chancellor, the Left Party is now celebrating his efforts to outmanoeuvre Trump and bring Ukraine under European control. Merz’s meeting in Kiev is not aimed at securing peace, but rather the escalation of the war against Russia, to which the chancellor even wants to provide Taurus cruise missiles to attack deep into the Russian heartland.

It is also noteworthy in this context that although the resolution describes the party’s approval of the war credits in the Bundesrat as “wrong,” another motion calling for the resignation of the responsible ministers and senators failed to gain a majority. There is no better way to sum up the fact that these radical phrases are nothing more than fig leaves for the party’s right-wing policies.

The same applies to the resolution “Stop expulsions and famine in Gaza—implement international law!” It calls for the implementation of the international arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a “(complete) withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza.” A “renewed military occupation and the resettlement of the entire population” must be prevented through international pressure.

But these are nothing more than lip service since the party reaffirmed the resolution passed at its previous conference in Halle, which invoked Israel’s right to “self-defence.” In its current motion, the party also describes the armed resistance of Palestinians against their decades of oppression as “terrorism” and calls for a ceasefire on both sides.

The Left Party continues to refuse to call genocide by its name. It also reaffirmed that anyone who denies the Israeli apartheid regime’s right to exist and advocates a joint, secular state with equal rights for all cannot be an ally of the Left Party. 

In view of this clear identification with the oppressive Zionist regime, the Left Party’s criticism of the Israeli government’s atrocities is no different from the German government’s empty warnings when it signs the next arms deal.

Overall, the hoopla and left-wing rhetoric could not conceal the right-wing character of the party. In her opening speech, the state chairwoman of the Left Party in Saxony stated that the party must act as a “responsible opposition,” as it was already doing in Saxony by supporting the CDU-SPD state executive on a vote-by-vote basis. “What we don’t need now is this silly game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, I’m much more left-wing than you,” she shouted to the applause of the delegates.

The former Left Party state premiere of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, used his speech to promote an alliance with the reactionary Catholic Church because in his inaugural speech Pope Leo XIV had said the same thing “as the Left Party in Germany.”

This sums up the character of the party conference. Like the Vatican, the Left Party stands to the right and only spouts left-wing phrases when it comes to stifling a movement from below and cutting it off from a genuinely socialist perspective.

Anyone who seriously wants to fight against war and fascism cannot do so in this degenerate party. 

What is needed is a genuinely socialist perspective that opposes the policy of war and growing nationalism with the international unity of workers in the struggle against capitalism. This perspective is embodied by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) and its sister parties of the Fourth International.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/19/mazt-m19.html

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SOME UNHAPPY CUSTOMERS AT JACOBIN:

There is a telling rumor in Berlin political circles. Upon his appointment as leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in 2022, Friedrich Merz was gifted a copy of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by his conservative colleague Wolfgang Schäuble, the veteran former finance minister and then president of the German parliament. A dismayed Merz is said to have handed back the book shortly after, exclaiming: “But this is a novel — what am I supposed to do with this?”

The novel in question, narrated by the last aristocratic ruler of a remote island principate in Sicily, revolves around the old social order’s attempt to contend with the threat of rapid political change, encapsulated by its most famous phrase: “If we want things to remain as they are, things will have to change.” On the surface, this isn’t too dissimilar from the situation in which Merz finds himself. The new German chancellor, sworn in on Tuesday after a shaky confirmation vote in parliament, was once dubbed “the prince of neoliberalism” and is very much an unreconstructed representative of a system whose time has come.

Merz’s own origin story is also patrician and set in a conservative backwater. He was born into the Sauvigny family, a minor branch of landed nobility in the Sauerland, the picturesque mountainous region in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Despite some early indiscretions — at one point he sported shoulder-length hair, rode a motorcycle, and was expelled from his first school — Merz’s early life is a faithful reflection of his class background. Raised staunchly Roman Catholic, he served in the military, joined a student fraternity (which in Germany are known as incubators of reactionary politics), and received a scholarship to study law at Bonn University. Following in his father’s footsteps, he became a judge upon graduation.

His first foray into politics, as a member of European Parliament, was relatively uneventful. After his entry into national politics in 1994, however, he quickly became a leading member of the CDU, with ambitions for higher office. Although he was eventually outmaneuvered by his long-time rival Angela Merkel and her allies. Upon leaving politics in 2009, the well-connected and effortlessly Anglophone Merz became a senior counsel for Chicago-based law firm Mayer Brown and the supervisory council chairman of the German operations of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

Now a multimillionaire member of the country’s business elite and owner of two private jets, Merz still pronounced himself “middle class.” A feeble attempt to seem more relatable, it indicated a renewal of his political ambitions in the wake of Merkel’s decision to relinquish her candidacy for chancellorship for the 2021 federal elections. After the CDU’s eventual defeat, which resulted in the ill-fated “traffic light” coalition led by Olaf Scholz, Merz took over as party leader. Following the collapse of Scholz’s government, the Christian Democrats led by Merz achieved a resounding victory in the snap election in February of this year.

The Merz government is a rerun of the “grand coalition” of the Christian Democrats and the nominally social democratic SPD as a junior partner. It now faces a daunting set of challenges, above all revitalizing Germany’s stagnant economy. Once hailed as Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany’s much-vaunted manufacturing sector has been declining. After years of a generalized slowdown in industrial production, the heavily export-oriented sector was dealt a severe blow by the dual shock of the pandemic and the Russian war against Ukraine.

The attendant disorder in global supply chains and the energy price shock laid bare the German economy’s dependence on both global demand and cheap Russian hydrocarbon imports (oil and gas). As firms adjust to the new reality and move parts of their operations abroad, industrial employment and growth have begun to shrink. Germany’s employment growth has been lackluster, and it has posted the worst economic record of any large European economy over the last years. The recently announced “reciprocal tariffs” of 20 percent on EU exports to the United States (temporarily reduced to 10 percent), in addition to a 25 percent import tax for the German-dominated automobile sector, are only set to intensify the crisis.

These developments merit a fundamental shift in economic policy. The approach of Merz’s predecessors, across the party-political spectrum, was dominated by an overzealous commitment to budgetary austerity, fueling the chronic shortage of both public and private investment in Germany’s aging infrastructure and capital stock. Despite historically low and even negative interest rates on German borrowing during the period, the commitment to restricting structural budget deficits, constitutionally enshrined as the “debt break” in 2009 and reinforced by the EU fiscal rules, dominated national politics in the 2010s.

Moreover, the dominant view that the country’s economic success depended on net exports and that these in turn required cost competitiveness, has led to two decades of relatively muted real wage growth. In concert with the German state’s role in wage repression (by setting public sector salaries), growth in domestic consumer spending has also remained relatively subdued, cementing the reliance on external demand. Attempts during the Merkel era to modernize this system were half-hearted and based on an outdated framework for industrial policy.

Abandoning the entrenched fiscal orthodoxy, however, won’t suffice. The possibility of a drawn-out trade war implies a fundamental reconfiguration of US-EU relations. This would necessarily include the emergence from under the US security umbrella; this, in turn, requires a comprehensive revamping of German military capabilities and the establishing of an independent European command.

This rupture in trade and security relations, if indeed it is permanent, implies a departure from two mainstays of mainstream German conservatism: a commitment to NATO and the Atlanticist order, and an aversion to issuing public debt at scale.

On the former, Merz seems to already have budged. Prior to Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, the then chancellor-elect had proclaimed that Germany must effectively consign its relationship with the United States to the past and find a replacement to NATO within months. The aim of European leaders should be to “strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we achieve independence from the US.”

And indeed, Merz’s first major achievement as incoming chancellor was the passing of a large €1 trillion defense and infrastructure spending package. This was an ominous tone with which to set his chancellorship. Not because it indicated a militaristic turn in German politics: a revamping of the country’s ramshackle army was long overdue, and the rearmament package, though significant, would bring military spending relative to GDP back to its Cold War levels. Military Keynesianism this is not.

What the move revealed instead was Merz’s ideological priorities. The constitutional amendment of the debt break — to exempt any military spending and create a “special fund” for infrastructure spending — required a parliamentary supermajority. Instead of bargaining with the newly resurgent left party (Die Linke) led by former Jacobin Germany editor Ines Schwerdtner, Merz chose to wrangle the corpse of the outgoing Bundestag, which reflected the election results of 2021, into a dirty compromise with the Green Party. In the chancellor’s view then, democratic backsliding is a worthy price to pay in exchange for disenfranchising the political left.

This raises the question of how he plans to approach the far right. In his public statements so far, he reiterated the line of mainstream political parties in Germany that any and all cooperation with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is off the table. But this omertá doesn’t seem to apply to other far-right figures in Europe. In a recent interview, Merz spoke approvingly of Italy’s cunning post-fascist leader Giorgia Meloni, who was a reliable partner on account of being pro-European and pro-Ukraine.

That same interview, given in February at the World Economic Forum in Davos, is a good showcase of Merz’s other defining attributes as a political thinker. Put simply, there are few ideas worth noting. The then prospective leader of Europe’s largest economy located Germany’s economic challenges in preserving the “competitiveness” of the manufacturing sector (“the backbone of our economy”) and doubling down on labor-market and welfare reforms, citing the “Bürgergeld” (the minimum unconditional unemployment benefit for job seekers) as “disincentive” to work. He took time to mock social democratic governments of Spain and Portugal and noted that their recent economic fortunes were despite their erroneous ideological commitments.

All of this sounds like old wine in old bottles. Manufacturing, which accounts for about 20 percent of employment, is not the country’s economic backbone. The vast majority of Germans work in the service sector, where much of the precarity and associated political frustration is located. Nor is “competitiveness,” which Merz evidently links to unit labor costs, the main challenge that German industry faces.

Instead, German firms are contending with poor infrastructure conditions, excessive bureaucratic hurdles, a demand-starved domestic market, and, above all, their own failure to innovate in the face of increasingly competitive Chinese producers. One of the few other proposals Merz has made a name with, drastically simplified corporate tax declarations (small enough to fit on a beer coaster), is equally unsuited to contending with this new reality.

It would also be too early to conclude that the recent amendment of the fiscal rules signals a genuine departure from the fiscal restraint that has held back German economic potential for decades. “On the contrary,” Merz reiterated after the large spending package was agreed upon in March, the new spending “does not reduce the need for consolidation of public budgets” but implies further fiscal retrenchment in the future due to the implied higher debt servicing costs.

Merz’s rival and predecessor Merkel was fond of lecturing her political opposition that Europe has “7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP, and 50 percent of its social spending.” This is a profound misdiagnosis of the continent’s problems, mistaking its privileges and wealth for its obstacles. But this notion of the supposed unsustainability of this arrangement has become firmly ingrained in the mainstream of German neoliberalism — a notion from which the new chancellor has so far failed to distinguish himself. A bland creature of the conservative wing of the business community, Merz lacks the intellectual and political resources to steer a large trading economy through a dual-front trade rivalry with the United States and China.

In hindsight, Merz should have heeded Wolfgang Schäuble’s advice. The strategy that has become synonymous with Il Gattopardo — how to ensure that everything remains the same by allowing everything to change — involves making concessions and appeasing the forces of disruptive change. But Germany won’t avoid a “second China shock” by simply appeasing the anti-immigrant sentiments of the German far right. Only a wholesale retreat from an exhausted and intellectually derelict geopolitical and economic policy framework stands a chance of securing a prosperous future for the country. Merz, in many ways the last gasp of German neoliberalism, is woefully unequipped to do so.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/germany-merz-chancellor-cdu-neoliberalism/

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MOONLIGHTING:

In 2006, there were discussions about conflicts of interest of members of the Bundestag who carried out other activities in addition to their parliamentary mandate. As a result, an agreement was reached that members of parliament should disclose their income from secondary activities to give the public an opportunity to assess whether their representatives may be harmfully dependent and influenced by financial contributions from third parties. Merz, who at that time had 18 secondary activities in addition to his parliamentary work according to one source, 11 according to another source and 14 according to the management of the Bundestag,[200][208][209] filed a lawsuit with the Federal Constitutional Court together with eight other members of the German Bundestag against the disclosure of their secondary income. At the hearing in October 2006, Merz pointed out that according to Article 38 of the Basic Law of Germany (constitution), members of parliament are "not bound by instructions and are subject only to their conscience". The President of the Bundestag cannot impose sanctions on members of parliament (MPs) for failing to disclose their secondary income, as such an action could be deemed unconstitutional. It has been argued that the regulation may encourage MPs to pursue career politics, potentially distancing them from real-life experiences. Secondary activities are not prohibited; instead, the regulation focuses on disclosing the number and amount of fees received. In July 2007, the Federal Constitutional Court voted four to four to reject a lawsuit, emphasizing that the political mandate must be central to parliamentary activities and highlighting concerns about potential bias from external payments.[210][211]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Merz?ysclid=mayzhxghki185931587

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German chancellor attends army brigade launch in Lithuania
Srinivas Mazumdaru with AP, AFP, Reuters, dpa

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius are attending a ceremony to mark the start of Germany’s first permanent foreign troop deployment since WWII. DW has the latest.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius will be in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius on Thursday to take part in a ceremony to mark the launch of a new armored brigade aimed at protecting NATO’s eastern flank.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt is scheduled to meet Danish Integration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek.

Also, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul will hold talks with Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Maitama Tuggar who is visiting Berlin on Thursday.

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MORE TO COME......

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