Merz takes charge this week, as German industry buckles and social fractures deepen. He will struggle to bring a wary public with him<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A few weeks before Germany\u2019s federal election in late February, Friedrich Merz was forced to backpedal after a daring gambit went awry<\/a>. His attempt to win votes by forcing through a hardline crackdown on migration had caused a rebellion in his own Christian Democratic party (CDU). Instead of positioning himself as a strong leader, he undermined the entire German political establishment.<\/p>\n Merz\u2019s strategy involved breaking a taboo by relying on far-right nationalists to pass legislation for the first time in Germany\u2019s postwar history. The move fractured the country\u2019s normally consensus-driven centrist parties in the Bundestag, sparked mass protests<\/a> and led to a rare public rebuke<\/a> from the former chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel.<\/p>\n Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes are the authors of Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany\u2019s Descent into Crisis. The German edition is Totally kaputt? Wie Deutschland sich selbst zerlegt<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Merz takes charge this week, as German industry buckles and social fractures deepen. He will struggle to bring a wary public with him A few weeks before Germany\u2019s federal election in late February, Friedrich Merz was forced to backpedal after a daring gambit went awry. His attempt to win votes by forcing through a hardline … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}