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After the national team’s embarrassing World Cup exit, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has caused astonishment with a post on the platform X. The chancellor praises the national team: “Even though going out hurts: what a match. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you have thrilled our country. We are proud of you.”
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Merz’s post has attracted heavy criticism in the comments. Comedian Oliver Pocher also weighed in beneath the chancellor’s post on the social media platform Instagram. “I hope the account has been hacked. But it fits the situation in this country,” he wrote. There was “nothing to sugar-coat” about the defeat, no one had been thrilled. Germany had embarrassed itself and delivered a “catastrophic performance”. If a chancellor produces such a wrong-headed analysis on Instagram in the middle of the night, Pocher says, people can only worry about how he assesses other issues.
Germany’s captain Kimmich sums up the mood like this: “As a child I knew Germany from television, and we were always in the semi-finals, the final. Of course you want to be able to give that to the children and people now, to the current generation as well. The fact is that we couldn’t give that to all the people back home, and that is very, very sad, especially at a time when in Germany it would do us enormous good to have something we can be proud of. Unfortunately the national team is not that, and we all share responsibility for that.”
The Bayern Munich star went on: “We players who were out on the pitch messed this up. It wasn’t the coach, it wasn’t the media, it wasn’t the referee and it wasn’t the opponents, it was solely us.”
Most fans on X also take a much dimmer view of Germany’s World Cup exit, as the performance against Paraguay was poor and culminated in the first World Cup penalty shoot-out ever lost by a German team.
At least: Karl Lauterbach (SPD) assesses the World Cup exit in similarly original terms as the chancellor.
The international press is also far less enthusiastic than Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU). The daily WELT quotes Spanish sports paper Marca as follows: “Germany is no longer Germany. At two consecutive World Cups they went out in the group stage – an unprecedented feat. (…) As we said: Germany is no longer what it once was.” The Italian sports daily La Gazetta dello Sport is quoted by WELT as calling it: “Flop Germany. Nagelsmann failure.”
Merz’s first line on X was: “Das war nix” – roughly, “That was rubbish”. The newspaper Bild summed it up accordingly: “Merz makes a fool of himself with his post.”
Twelve hours after his first post and the many negative reactions, the chancellor spoke up again and wrote on X: “We celebrate victories together. And in defeat we stand together. That is what makes us strong. Whoever wears the eagle on their chest deserves our backing and not our ridicule.”
The chancellor’s X debacle and the national team’s World Cup disaster are likely, for many people in Germany, to be symptomatic of the state of the country as a whole.
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