Imagine your program being “Fuck the people. They are lazy free-loaders anyway. We need to demolish social security to make the rich richer!” and your reaction to every new low of approval being “We need to stay on our course until all those idiots finally understand our genius!” and you have an accurate picture of Friedrich Merz and his government.
Now combine this with the fact that Merz took over the party lead with the explicit goal to half the far-right AfD’s numbers (~10% back then) but instead spend all his time parroting their talking points (because the voters you lose to the far-right will totally come back if you aim to be a bad copy of the extremists they voted for…) thus making them now stand at ~28% in polls. All while his party also got completely eliminated from parliament in a recent state election by missing the required 5%, a historical first time ever achievement. So his own party (and the remaining voters) aren’t thrilled either…
Imagine your program being “Fuck the people. They are lazy free-loaders anyway. We need to demolish social security to make the rich richer!” and your reaction to every new low of approval being “We need to stay on our course until all those idiots finally understand our genius!” and you have an accurate picture of Friedrich Merz and his government.
Now combine this with the fact that Merz took over the party lead with the explicit goal to half the far-right AfD’s numbers (~10% back then) but instead spend all his time parroting their talking points (because the voters you lose to the far-right will totally come back if you aim to be a bad copy of the extremists they voted for…) thus making them now stand at ~28% in polls. All while his party also got completely eliminated from parliament in a recent state election by missing the required 5%, a historical first time ever achievement. So his own party (and the remaining voters) aren’t thrilled either…
It’s amazing how similar this sounds like 100 years ago. Or how similar it is to every pro austerity politician ever.