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March 30, 2021 - 11:59am
“This is entirely my fault and I ask the German public for forgiveness”.
Angela Merkel’s apology last week was widely welcomed and went some way to appease a country fed up with the botched vaccination roll-out and yet more ineffective lockdown measures.
Asked in a televised interview on Sunday if she had apologised for not acting decisively enough, Merkel’s curt answer was: ‘Nein.’ She only accepted responsibility for the uncertainty caused by her government’s u-turn on the controversial Easter lockdown. For structural problems in the wider covid response, the minister presidents were to blame. As heads of the 16 states that make up the country’s federal structure, they hold all the power from vaccine roll-out to lockdown specifics.
Smelling blood, the interviewer proceeded to ask whether Berlin was gearing up for a power grab. Should it not impose stricter measures onto the states, which currently enjoy a great amount of autonomy? Merkel responded with a thinly veiled threat: ‘There is an option for greater intervention from the Bundestag.’
Merkel does not make threats like this lightly — it’s not her style. She knows full well that the decentralisation of power in Germany has not only been a prerequisite for the peaceful rebuilding of the country after the Second World War, but it is also a means of holding the nation together. Religious, cultural and historical divides still run deep and autonomy over crucial areas such as education and policing is an integral way of respecting these differences within one federal framework. Merkel is fully aware of the gravity of her remarks as she calmly turns the screw on her minister-presidents.
But Merkel went even further, singling out individual politicians for her sharpest criticism — most notably Armin Laschet, CDU leader and a potential candidate to succeed Merkel as chancellor. The interviewer asked her directly whether, in his role as minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, Laschet had failed to honour the agreement made with Merkel’s government in Berlin. She said that he had, even if he was not the only one. In her usual understated style, she added: ‘And this does not fill me with joy.’
Criticism as sharp and direct as this is very rare from Merkel, and it is likely to have been triggered by concerns about the upcoming general election. Merkel’s own CDU/CSU is crashing in the polls, now only single digits ahead of the buoyant Greens. It has suffered historic defeats in two recent state elections (both former CDU strongholds) and Armin Laschet himself consistently scores as the least favoured candidate to succeed Merkel.
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SubscribeNow that’s she’s on a roll, perhaps she will ask the German people for forgiveness with regard to abandoning nuclear power, committing to a process whereby their money will be funnelled to southern Europe in perpetuity, destroying their savings and pensions with zero interest rates, and flooding their country with people who are of little or no use whatsoever. What an appalling leader she has been.
She will be seen as their Blair most definitely.
So now the IMF has just printed another 500,000,000,000 SDR dollars (the imaginary money the IMF created, which is based on a basket of the 5 top currencies, thus popping into air 800,000,000,000 additional dollars of another layer of Fiat currency on top of the golbal fiat currency, thus devalueing all money. )And no one even hears of it!
I never hear anything solid of the ECB numbers, must not read the right news, but I have very great expetations of a global monitary collaps, 60%+ crash in the stock marked, from all this. Harry Dent says there is NO lifeboat to escape it. Not gold, Commodities, Blue Chips, Developing nations, bonds, cash, realestate, – that we are all doomed!
When her citizens were mown down at a Christmas market in Berlin, she did not say a word to the families, only meeting with them a year later, after a private memorial service. Not a word to the press. To this day, German victims are unknown.
To protect their privacy? Hardly. TheGerman press made do, in order for the public to help process their rage, fear, and grief, by covering the funerals of the Italian and Polish victims, publicly mourned in their own countries.
Apparently there could be no German victims, because there could be no “hate” on German soil. No victims, no terrorism, just public order.
The most surprising, and in some ways troubling, revelation in this article is that the currently most popular candidate to succeed Merkel is the one who favors strictest lockdowns. The German people seem willing to lock themselves down almost indefinitely. I suppose Germany is a rich country with a strong social safety net. People can survive quite well in lockdown, although at what cost to their future I don’t know.
There is mounting evidence that, over the long term, lockdowns are ineffective at stopping the spread of the pandemic and reducing the death toll. Targeted protection of vulnerable groups is the better strategy. But many people seem unwilling to accept this conclusion.
How many top politicians, leave when they should.?they all cling onto power longer than they should. So most end in failure, or tragedy. Can you name one who left on top, voluntary.
Maybe the term limits we have for presidents here in the States should be adopted by parliamentary governments? But isn’t it their party that keeps them on? How do they “cling onto power” when their party doesn’t want them anymore, e.g., Mrs. Thatcher, right?
Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela perhaps, although Havel was h presidents as opposed to a pure politician. Was Mandela PM or president? I suppose it could be said that FDR, Truman and Eisenhower all succeeded.
Two good examples, although Havel had a life and a job before becoming /pressed to be president, and Mandela, age must have played a large part, that and the fact he achieved his goal, and peacefully!
Very poor attempt at a pun in the headline. Confusing rather than witty. Or, perhaps, Lasches is simply a typo?
Oh please. You are leaving out that Laschet was being groomed to be her next heir apparent, after Kramp-Karrenbauer spectacularly crashed out before him.
Her admitting that Laschet is not filling her with joy is on par with her having said about the migrant crisis that, oh well, “they are here now.” Merkel rarely addresses critical issues. Her “understatement” is expressed when she is washing her hands of another failed initiative of hers, here choosing an unpopular successor and crashing her party, there being “unable” to close borders, letting in 3 million migrants, and crashing her party. Tschuss, Merkel. Yes 3 million. Germany had a population of 80 million, but now has 83 million.