German Political Establishment Responds to Trump with Idiotic Constitutionally-Anchored Pledge to Deindustrialise in the Next 20 Years

I’m hosting family, so this won’t be a long post, but the story of Friedrich Merz’s debt brake overhaul continues to be one of the greatest political farces I have ever seen, and I need to get this off my chest.

Let us summarise, briefly, what has happened so far:

The CDU is the party of fiscal responsibility. His Triviality the Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz presented himself throughout the campaign as an unusual fan of Germany’s constitutionally-anchored debt break. He told everybody that he could not imagine ever borrowing in excess of 0.35% of annual GDP, so interested was he in limiting the tax burden of future generations.
All of the while, Merz and his advisers were scheming in secret about how they might overhaul the debt brake, firstly because they could not give the slightest shit about the tax burdens of future generations, and secondly because they spent the months since November 2023 observing what happens when a government that has no ideas is also deprived of money. “I have no ideas,” Merz said to himself during this time. “What happens if like Olaf Scholz I also end up with no money?”
Exactly two weeks ago, US President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had a verbal spat in the Oval Office. This spat put the fear of God into the Eurocrat establishment, for whom the Ukraine war has become a sacred and essentially religious cause. Merz capitalised on the panic to unveil his massive debt spending plan. He and his would-be coalition partners, the Social Democrats, announced that they wished to spend €500 billion of debt on “infrastructure” and untold hundreds of billions of debt on defence. This would entail adjustments to the debt brake, in the same way setting your house on fire would entail adjustments to your living arrangements.
This massive spending package will require a constitutional amendment, which can only be achieved with a two-thirds vote of the Bundestag. In the newly elected Bundestag, Die Linke and AfD will be in a position to block this amendment and Merz will be stuck with the debt brake. Thus Merz wants to break the debt brake in the final days of the old Bundestag – a strategy that has put him in the amazing position of grovelling before the election’s biggest losers. Specifically, Merz has spent the past few days feverishly negotiating with the Green Party, who will not even have any role in his Government, just to get it to sign off on his insane spending plans.

I wrote a lot here and on X about the election nightmare scenario I called the “Kenyapocalypse” – a hypothetical in which the Greens and the Social Democrats would each be too weak to give the Union parties a majority on their own, such that Friedrich Merz would be forced to negotiate a coalition deal with both of them at once. In the end, Kenyapocalypse did not happen; the CDU avoided it by a razor’s breadth. Merz, however, turns out to be such a monumental retard that he has managed to recreate a simulacrum of Kenyapocalypse for himself. The man has been on his knees kissing not only Social Democrat but also Green ass for days. He has been begging the Greens to sign onto his debt plan, and the Greens have finally agreed, in return for the following concessions:

The “defence” funding that will be exempt from the debt brake is to be defined as widely as possible. All kinds of things will count as debt brake-exempt “defence” spending now, probably including various climate nonsense.
The €500 billion “infrastructure” debt is to include €100 billion specifically earmarked for the “Climate and Transformation Fund” – the central financial instrument of the energy transition. This is basically infinity windmill money, you might as well set it on fire. Beyond this specific allocation, any projects that contribute to making Germany “climate neutral by 2045” will also be eligible for the €500 billion exception. This whole thing will be a massive wad of debt for Green nonsense and I would like to take this moment to laugh at everyone who told me how happy I should be that Merz was trying to fix Germany’s bridges with this debt bullshit. Nothing of the sort is going to happen.
You will note that the explicit goal of achieving “climate neutrality” by 2045 is slated to be among the very few positive political points anchored in the German constitution. “Climate neutrality” is a more expansive concept than mere “carbon neutrality” or Net Zero. It describes a utopian state of affairs in which human actions have no influence on the climate whatsoever.

These are prizes the Greens could not achieve even at the height of their influence in the 2021 elections. Strictly speaking, the entire traffic light coalition fell apart over a matter of €3 billion. Now the Greens are getting €100 billion for free, all because Merz is determined to become Chancellor whatever the cost.

This deal is an abomination and I despair that it can no longer be stopped. The constitutional court in Karlsruhe has rejected attempts to block this manoeuvre, which I expected – the old Bundestag, as long as it still exists, cannot be limited in its prerogatives. The best option now is for Alternative für Deutschland and Die Linke (the Left Party) to join forces and compel the new Bundestag to constitute itself, ahead of the scheduled vote by the old Bundestag. For this, we need a mere 25% of the new Bundestag to agree, but the Left Party is so far withholding its cooperation. There is but one true opposition party in Germany, and that is the AfD. Love it or hate it, it is on the right side of these issues again and again, and I hope it can bring Die Linke around.

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