Watch now (3 mins) | Friedrich Merz stood in a half-empty cinema on Schönhauser Allee — the Colosseum, Berlin — and, being a man of no original thought, reached for a dead French aristocrat to do his moral inversion heavy lifting.

͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏Watch now

Chancellor SchMerz and the Barbarism He Cannot See

ISLANDER REPORTS

FEB 25

Subscribe

Let us talk about those men. Because Merz the coward would not. Ukrainian casualties, corroborated in their devastating architecture by Ukraine’s own former Prosecutor General — speaking on Ukrainian television, a man with no conceivable interest in flattering Moscow — run to over half a million killed and wounded. The real number sits at over two million. North of thirty thousand becoming casualties every single month. Thirty thousand. Per month. Two million Ukrainian men are on a state wanted list for refusing mobilisation — refusing with their feet and their terror the war this Chancellor performs solidarity with from a cinema seat. Two hundred thousand soldiers admitted by Kiev as having gone AWOL. Again the true number is likely a multiple. Men swim frozen rivers at night, paying criminal gangs fifteen thousand dollars to guide them through razor wire into Romania — into anything, away from the front Merz calls a moral imperative. The imperative being not in the Kantian tradition of moral imperative, but in the imperative that it be Ukranianes sons who spill blood for a war only a minority of bloodlusting elites in the West demanded. The average Ukrainian frontline soldier is now 45 years old. The volunteers are gone. What fills the gap is coercion, and even that is putrefying: conscription officers selling escape routes to the desperate for eight thousand dollars a man. This is the cause he celebrated in Berlin while weapons dealers exchanged cards in the lobby. Name the beast: a war that the people being conscripted to fight are fleeing by the millions, administered by a man who has never spent a night in a trench, celebrated in a cinema named after the city being consumed to make it possible, and called, with a straight face, European values. For a war less than a quarter of Ukranians want to fight. Merz and his fellow Atlanticist cowards should lead by example and fight their own war with their sons and daughters. 

Here is the confession his own speech contained — in public, in front of witnesses, unremarked upon by every journalist in that room. He said, with the tranquility of a man who has never once been asked to pay the price of his own delusions, that this war ends only “when one side is exhausted, militarily or economically.” Read it again. Not when peace is negotiated. Not when sovereignty is secured. Not when the killing stops. When one side is exhausted. He told you. The strategy was never victory. It was never justice. It was the deliberate, calculated, industrially managed prolongation of a killing field until one population of human beings runs out of the capacity to suffer – by comparison Ukraine’s forced suffering by the West has made British troops drowning in the mud of the Somme look like deft battlefield strategy, the exhaustion he is banking on is the exhaustion of flesh. Of the man snatched from from his bed in the middle of the night while his children and wife cry knowing their father and husband’s fate is sealed. Of the boy given three weeks of training and a rifle. You, Chancellor — you have appointed yourself the manager of that exhaustion. You administer it from a cinema. You name your war rally after the city whose people are being fed into the machine that produces it. You invite the press. You collect the enforced applause. You go home. And the thirty thousand per month continue, on schedule, as budgeted.

Now the lens turns on the country he was elected to serve — and here the betrayal stops being political and becomes personal, stops being reckless and becomes a crime with a return address. Germany. Three consecutive years of contraction or stagnation, the longest paralysis in seven decades, the worst-performing major economy on the continent by every serious measure. Since 2019, a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs gone. Crude steel output down ten percent. Automotive production collapsing from 5.6 million vehicles toward 3.4 million in 2026 — the industrial spine of a continent, factory by factory, dismantled. Ask the men of Bochum, where Opel built cars for half a century before the gates closed and three thousand families learned what it means when a government’s priorities lie elsewhere. Ask the steelworkers of Rheinhausen, whose plant became a symbol of everything German industry once was and a monument to everything its political class decided it no longer needed to be. Business insolvencies in the first half of 2025 hit their highest level in a decade. Translation: Handelsblatt Research called it the greatest economic crisis in German postwar history and they were not being dramatic. Total national debt at €2.79 trillion — up 17% since 2021 — heading toward 100% of GDP by 2029, triggering an EU excessive deficit procedure, debt servicing costs doubling within four years. The government’s response: borrow €174 billion in 2026 alone, the second-highest annual debt issuance in the history of the Federal Republic, and channel it toward rearmament, toward US long-range missiles on German soil, toward the military infrastructure of a continent whose populations were promised — on the record, in formal commitments — that NATO would not advance one inch eastward. He is not rebuilding Germany. He is consuming it — street by street, pension by pension, factory by factory — to sustain a suicidal geopolitical project whose principal beneficiaries set up their stalls in his lobby and shook his hand after the show. The German people are being asked to fund their own dispossession and call it values.

But Germans are not calling it values. In December 2025, the morning parliament voted to reinstate conscription, Germans did not wait to be organised. They poured into ninety cities simultaneously. Students walked out. Young Germans — the generation whose blood Merz has budgeted — said plainly, publicly, on the record, that they would rather live under occupation than die in a war manufactured by men who will never stand in a trench. The arrival of US long-range missiles on German soil produced what government sources were forced to describe as widespread unrest. And the electoral verdict is not approaching. It has arrived. The AfD is surfing toward 30% nationally and over 40% in the east — 39% in Saxony-Anhalt, 38% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and climbing, the entire grand coalition pooled together unable to match them. The most seismic reversal in the Federal Republic’s political history, not predicted, not pending — completed, in a single year, by a people who have made their judgment and recorded it. Merz’s approval is cratering by the day: 20% satisfaction, 80% dissatisfied — a figure that has sunk below the worst numbers ever recorded for the man he replaced, Olaf Scholz, the previous holder of that particular distinction. Forty-nine percent of Germans expect his government to collapse before its term expires. The audience at Café Kyiv itself has halved year on year, the empty seats a verdict in upholstery. The German people are not warning him. They are not signalling displeasure. They have already decided. The ballot, the street, the school walkout, the empty cinema seat — these are not instruments of future judgment. They are the reckoning, already delivered, already written, already past the point where any government has ever successfully reversed it.

The reckoning does not wait for scholars or electoral calendars. It is already in the room. It is in the 90 cities that filled without being called. It is in the frozen rivers of Ukraine the conscript crossed at midnight rather than serve this war. It is in the factory gate at Bochum that never reopened while the government that closed it borrowed billions for missiles. It is in the empty seat at Café Kyiv, in the poll that shows 80% of his own country looking at Friedrich Merz and finding nothing worth keeping. These are not portents. They are the verdict. Already rendered. Already irreversible. The only remaining question is the speed of execution.

And so we arrive at what this moment actually is — because Merz cannot see it, sealed inside his cinema and his borrowed Custine and the bubble of a dying order that has mistaken its own noise for power. What is happening is the visible, measurable final collapse of the post-Cold War unipolar settlement — that arrogant interregnum when Washington and Brussels convinced themselves history had a permanent winner and that winner was them. It did not. And what has assembled in its place — from Beijing to Moscow to the Global South, indifferent to sanctions, transacting in currencies that bypass the dollar, building architectures that bypass Brussels — will not be unwound by a chancellor misquoting a 19th-century aristocrat while drone dealers network in his lobby. The German people know this. In the way that people paying the actual price of a policy always know before the people making it do — viscerally, in the gut, in the kitchen, in the factory that is no longer there — they know the war is unwinnable, the debt is unsustainable, the divorce from Russian energy was industrial self-harm on a generational scale, and the man in that cinema is not governing them. He is sacrificing them to keep a dead order on fumes, to buy minutes.

Friedrich Merz will face his reckoning — not as abstraction, not as history’s verdict delivered softly across decades, but as the undeniable, arriving, unstoppable consequence of ninety cities, of every empty seat in his own cinema, of every man who swam a frozen river rather than fight his war, of every worker in Bochum and Rheinhausen and a hundred towns like them who watched their factory close while their government mortgaged their grandchildren’s future to fund a war they never voted for and do not want. The streets are already speaking. The ballots will come. And when historians reconstruct how the most powerful industrial economy in Europe was governed into deliberate ruin — immiserated, conscripted, mortgaged, and lectured about barbarism by the man doing it — his name will stand in that account as what he is: the last true believer in an order the world had already left, standing in a cinema, delivering a mutilated quotation, surrounded by the merchants of the war he would not end, while outside, in ninety cities, the people whose country he was burning found their voice. They refused. History doesn’t wait for men like Friedrich Merz to understand what is happening to them. It simply happens.