Germany’s Merz, in New York Times’ speak, is the leader Europe needs

Germany’s current right-wing chancellor Friedrich Merz is a descendent of Nazis. His grandfather, a mayor of a German town, named streets after Hitler and Goebbels, and his father fought in the German army as part of Hitler’s forces. Merz himself famously, like Hitler, called for an attack on the city hall in his hometown of Brilon in Rhineland Westphalia to overthrown “the red town hall” which was hardly red, just under the providence of the lawfully elected Social Democratic Party leadership, the equivalent in Germany of the U.S. Democrats or British Labour Party.

Merz is presiding over the shift in German industry from a peacetime to a war footing. Under his “leadership,” as Germany has cut itself off from cheap Russian oil and natural gas, the heart of the European economic engine, the German auto industry, is leaving. Volkswagen recently announcing plant closings. He is overseeing a Germany where the only true industrial growth is in weapons.

The new German economic miracle is in the development of companies like Merz’s homeland firm Rheinmetall, which is attempting to rival the U.S. war machine in its development of munitions and armored vehicles. Growth is expected to be five times this year what it was last year.

The Nazi descendent also has moved Germany closer to a compulsory draft with a letter sent to all 18-year-olds asking if they would like to enlist in the army. It’s all to fight the supposed Russian menace, as once again the country is being led into a panic to fight an enemy which has no designs on it, as in fact Russia instead leans east and is content to have the West sow the seeds of its own destruction.

How does Western media present this extremely pugilistic figure? Let’s take a look at a mid-December piece in the New York Times about Merz headlined, “Europe’s pragmatic deal maker.”

Merz is presented as an Adenauer-type Christian Democrat, as sturdy at the helm of state as he is in piloting his own plane. It was Konrad Adenauer who presided over, yes, the buildup of the economic engine of Germany but also the rolling back of Germany’s de-nazification, as the country became a U.S. bulwark in the Cold War. The former Nazi past was forgotten in the rush to “contain” the Soviet Union and deter domestic Communist influence.

Merz’s is called a “throwback” form of leadership—the return of a nostalgic kinder, gentler period. Adenauer’s essentially post-Nazi regime is disguised as a democracy in this telling, though the author notes in passing that Merz, called “the strongest leader standing among Europe’s major powers,” has “lost support” among his own people. This description is itself a kinder, gentler way of concealing that, as Reuters described it, Merz is “one of the least popular chancellors in memory.” His ratings continuing to fall and with the majority of Germans describing him as “untrustworthy.”

For The Times though, with the ratings of his fellow warlike leaders Macron in France and Starmer in Britain far below Merz’s own low ratings, which have 75% of Germans unhappy with his performance, he is in Timesspeak “Europe’s indispensable leader.” His strong stewardship is shown for The Times in his pushing to steal the 300 billion euros in Russian assets that the Europeans seized, a bid which luckily for European banks and the European financial structure failed or the continent would be wiped off the investment ledger as a forever unsafe place to park money.

The Times is betting and hoping that Merz can help prolong the war in Ukraine, a war Europe cannot win and that every day sees Ukrainians either dying or deserting, many after being shanghaied into a military they understand is a death trap.

A sign of Merz’s practicality and prodigious statesmanship for The Times is that when he came to visit Trump last June he brought a framed copy of Trump’s grandfather’s birth certificate. This is the grandfather who made the family fortune in the West in brothels, arriving too late to mine for gold and instead deciding to mine the miners, that is ply them with alcohol and sex workers.

So, you have the descendent of Nazis flattering the descendent of alcohol and sex-trafficking, and both having a good laugh over their being leaders of their respective countries instead of being tossed on the scrap heap of history.

Merz, the story tells us early on without identifying where, has been “shaped by his years in corporate law.” It’s only several paragraphs later we find out that these companies include BlackRock, which will have a substantial share in rebuilding a devastated Ukraine, a devastation Merz is attempting to prolong by extending the war so that the cleanup bill from which he and his BlackRock buddies can profit will increase.

We learn he is from a “bucolic corner” of Western Germany. This “bucolic corner,” part of the Rhine, was seized by Hitler in 1936 and became the cornerstone of the arms buildup that enabled the Führer to attack Europe.

Merz’s “pragmatism” is proved when as Trump was imposing his tariffs on Europe, though there was minimal fight back as the old continent succumbed, Merz urged Europe to genuflect harder and stay on its knees, opposing even mild opposition.

The author is granted a day with Merz who he describes lovingly as acting like “an exuberant salesman,” “upbeat” about the German auto industry he is in fact sabotaging.

The point of the story, at a moment when Trump was claiming he was making a breakthrough in ending the war in Ukraine, was that Merz was emerging as a leader who would not broker peace, in other words as a leader in touch with his Nazi past leading the continent into a devastating war just like the last Nazi-led war where Germany will again be reduced to rubble. How “bucolic” can you get?

This story springs from The Times’ imagination which is now, in desperate times, turned from domination through trade to domination through war, with Germany and Europe as the proxy sites of that war. This, in Timesspeak, is “pragmatic,” but what is most “pragmatic” about it is watching Europe be devastated while, as in the Second World War, America looks on and then paws its way through the rubble panning for and sifting out whatever gold nuggets are still left in the wasteland.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.

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