Merz: “it makes my government look successful”
The chancellor’s reflexive victory lap after Germany’s football team gives him the oldest office trick in Berlin: borrow a clean shirt from the athletes while the cabinet sits in yesterday’s laundry.
By Gus Pothole
Sports Cynicism & Civic Collapse Reporter
Germany lost, and Merz reached for the nearest mirror
Friedrich Merz congratulated Germany’s football team after its historic penalty collapse against Paraguay and then posted the sort of sentence that makes a country instinctively check whether the man has been left alone with the keys. “It makes my government looks successful,” he wrote, which is the kind of grammar you get when vanity is sweating through a shirt collar and trying to pass itself off as statecraft. He didn’t sound relieved. He sounded pleased in the damp, needy way a man sounds when he has found a fresh humiliation to lean against and rub his ambition on.
The timing was vulgar. Germany had just received it first in World Cup defeat on penalties, and Merz responded like every mid-level manager in a cheap suit: instead of accepting the stink of failure, he stepped into it, smoothed his hair, and tried to sell the smell as cologne. The team missed the spot kicks; Merz missed the point; the Chancellery got to do what it always does, which is launder embarrassment through ceremony until it comes out as “resilience.” In Germany, even collapse gets managed by a committee.
The institutional choreography was almost touching in its filth. First comes the loss. Then comes the flag. Then the polished sentence from a spokesman, the one that says the government “acknowledges the team’s effort,” as if effort were a receipt and not a bruise. Then the television panels arrive with their obedient little jaw muscles, talking about “unity,” “character,” and “the German footballing spirit,” which is a lovely phrase for people who believe national identity can be salvaged by a lighting package and a stern handshake. Failure is never allowed to sit in the room long enough to stink; it gets deodorized into morale.
In Wedding, where people still watch football with actual nerves instead of branding instincts, the reaction was less ceremonial. At a Turkish café off Müllerstraße, under a TV that looked like it had survived three landlords and a minor coup, men leaned over tea glasses and watched the post circulate on someone’s phone. “He talks like the team lost so he could stand behind them and look taller,” said Mehmet K., 51, who requested anonymity because his cousin still owes him money and politics only makes debt smell more intimate.
That is the thing about Wedding: nobody there confuses language with virtue. The neighborhood is full of people who know exactly what a tidy sentence costs, because they live among the invoices. The bakery next door has three kinds of bread and one exhausted cashier; the barber on Seestraße trims heads with the expression of a man trying not to inherit the republic; the spätis stay open late enough to sell beer, cigarettes, and a few final lies. On Müllerstraße, the flags are smaller than the rent anxiety, and the civic fatigue is older than the slogans. Nobody needs a chancellor to explain a loss to them. They can smell one from the tram stop.
Merz, of course, is built for this kind of grubby opportunism. He is the office boy of national disappointment, a man with the hungry polish of someone forever trying to climb onto a podium that other people had to bleed for. He treats public feeling like a lap he can sit on if he smiles hard enough. Every crisis becomes a little vanity mirror; every athlete becomes an unpaid intern for his image. The same state that cannot repair railways, staff schools, or make its own bureaucracy stop behaving like a hostage note suddenly finds endless energy when there is a football team nearby to borrow dignity from.
The right, naturally, got its usual patriotic stiffening from the flag and the spectacle of disciplined suffering. The center performed its favorite trick: national grief wrapped in managerial language, the old German hobby of making defeat sound like a work assignment. And the left got to sniff at the whole thing while keeping one eye on the same television, because nothing lubricates moral superiority like a public humiliation you did not personally cause. Everyone got to pose. Nobody had to pay. That is the national sport now: masturbation in a suit while the country eats the disappointment.
A spokeswoman for the Chancellery said Merz meant to “acknowledge the team’s effort.” Which is lovely, in the way a hand on the lower back is lovely when it is clearly steering. What the country heard instead was a man trying to climb on top of a humiliation, whispering into the microphone as if it were a pillow, pretending he had organized the disaster and was therefore entitled to enjoy the body heat.
The DFB offered no immediate response, perhaps because it takes time to translate embarrassment into the approved dialect of consequences. Merz, meanwhile, did what German leaders do best: he borrowed the sweat of exhausted athletes, stood in the wreckage with his tie still straight, and called the mess a success before anyone had even finished bleeding into the turf. He did not rise above the loss. He crawled onto it and asked for applause.