"At this World Cup you thrilled our country," writes Chancellor Merz after the team’s exit, but reactions suggest he has badly misjudged the public mood.
After the national team’s embarrassing World Cup exit, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has raised eyebrows with a post on the social media platform X. The chancellor praised 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.”
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Merz’s post has drawn 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 that fits the situation in this country,” he wrote. There was “nothing to be glossed over” about the defeat, no one had been thrilled. Germany had embarrassed itself and produced a “catastrophic performance”. If a chancellor writes such a blatantly wrong analysis in the middle of the night on Instagram, Pocher said, you can only worry about how he assesses other issues as well.
Germany’s captain Joshua Kimmich summed up the mood like this: “I know Germany from television when I was a child, it was always semi-finals, finals. Of course you want to be able to give that to the children and to people and to the current generation as well, and the fact is that we couldn’t give that to all the people back home. That is very, very sad, especially at a time when it would do us extremely good in Germany to have something we can be proud of. The national team unfortunately isn’t that, and we all bear responsibility for it.”
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 opposition, it was us and us alone.”
Most fans on X also take a far more critical view of Germany’s World Cup exit, as the performance against Paraguay was poor and culminated in the first penalty shoot-out defeat in Germany’s World Cup history.
At least Karl Lauterbach (SPD) assesses the World Cup exit in similarly quirky fashion to the chancellor:
The international press is also far less enthusiastic than Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU). The daily WELT quotes Spanish sports newspaper Marca as follows: “Germany is no longer Germany. At two consecutive World Cups they have gone out in the group stage - an unprecedented feat. (...) As we said: Germany is no longer what it once was.” Italy’s sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport is quoted by WELT as writing: “Flop Germany. Nagelsmann failure.”
Merz’s verdict on X: that was nothing. The tabloid Bild sums it up accordingly: “Merz makes himself look ridiculous with his posting.”