Much of Merz’s public reputation, particularly on the broad liberal and left-wing space, stems from this time out of the political spotlight. In particular, his role as chairman of the German division of BlackRock, the American asset management behemoth, is seen with a critical eye by most Germans. His close personal ties to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as reported in a recent biography by Volker Resing, only add to the perception that Merz represents the financial elite more than the electorate.
Still, his advocates seek to reframe this association not as a liability but as a strength. His corporate entanglements are portrayed as proof of worldly competence, a business-minded sensibility absent from the typical career politician. “Through his many board positions,” write Jutta Falke-Ischinger and Daniel Goffart in their biography of Merz, “he gained a deep and novel insight into the economy.” Between 2007 and 2018, Merz served on at least nineteen corporate boards, from Commerzbank to BASF and the recycling giant Interseroh. Just as he was plotting his political comeback, his connections earned him millions and embedded him within Europe’s financial elite.
His proponents have tried to downplay the potential for conflicts of interest. Resing cites a corporate attorney familiar with Merz’s legal work who insists that “the substantive work was always done by others.” Merz, the implication goes, was more of a figurehead than an operative.
Guy works for Black Rock and then makes his main policies:
- decrease taxes for business and the rich
- cutting public services to fund those tax cuts
- increasing national debt to fund military contracts and tax cuts for the rich
And then he talks about how people need to work more, as if he’s ever had a real job in his life or as if that’s some good marker for a person. A good man wants to improve society for everyone, and working more efficiently (aka less hours, not more) is improvement.
Merz is a classic conservative, he wants to make everything worse for everyone but the rich and wealthy and pretend it’s because he’s business savvy. He’ll sell this vision as necessary or for the economy or against the wave of invading foreigners, and all the while life will get worse for working Germans. For good people.
Don’t get fooled, Merz and the CDU are bad for Germany in the same way Trump and Republicans are bad for the US (or insert your local conservative party of choice).
His entanglements with various lobby groups aside, Merz is just a terrible politician.
Merz is not a diplomat or negotiator he just wants to be the boss and give orders.
That is not how you get things done in a coalition government or in parliament.Between 2007 and 2018, Merz served on at least nineteen corporate boards, from Commerzbank to BASF and the recycling giant Interseroh. Just as he was plotting his political comeback, his connections earned him millions and embedded him within Europe’s financial elite.
and in his entire “political career” did he ever had a leading government chair… PRIME chancellor material right there… The chair he sits on I mean.
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That’s in fact false news.
It is somewhat misleading but not false. He did vote against it as the linked article also points out.
English tl:dr for those interested: He did vote for an earlier proposal that would have made marital rape illegal but allowed potential victims to block an investigation.
Critics feared that abusive spouses could force their victims to block investigations.
That proposal ultimately failed, a new version without “veto” was proposed, Merz voted against but it ultimately passed.In addition to that martial rape could be, and was, prosecuted as coercion and bodily injury. Corporal punishment of spouses (which would be a way around that) was legalised in Prussia in 1794, then outlawed again in 1812, in Bavaria the span was from 1756 to 1900 (introduction of the BGB).
Still takes a very special kind of conservative to object to categorising it as rape, and that’s the exact type of conservative Merz is.
The exact same reform btw also made the law gender-neutral. “Rape” doesn’t exist as a thing in itself in German law, in a sense, it’s a name given to a specific aggravation of sexual assault:
(6) In especially serious cases, the penalty is imprisonment for a term of at least two years. An especially serious case typically occurs where
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the offender has sexual intercourse with the victim or has the victim have sexual intercourse or commits such similar sexual acts on the victim or has the victim commit them on them which are particularly degrading for the victim, especially if they involve penetration of the body (rape), or
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the offence is committed jointly by more than one person.
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Oh, yeah, he voted for the earlier version in which an abusive husband could beat up his wife until she retracted her accusations. That totally absolves him. Not.
Given that Angela Merkel is at least partly if not wholly responsible for the majority of the geopolitical problems the EU is struggling with right now, fuck this guy.
Angela Merkel protected us from this guy for 16 years. If she did nothing else she should get a medal for that alone.
I’ll be honest, I completely believe that there is always someone worse Germany can put in charge, but the mismanagement of the 2015 refugee crisis, the mismanagement of the Orbán and Putin regimes all came from Merkel, and both the invasion of Ukraine and the erosion of democracy in Eastern Europe can be traced to those decisions made by Merkel.
Those decisions, by the way, have been taken to provide German industry with cheap resources and workers at the expense of workers’ welfare in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the safety of Europe at large from Russia.
So yeah, fuck Angela Merkel for making sure Orbán got unlimited EU money in exchange for things like this. And fuck Angela Merkel for appeasing Putin despite it being obvious that he will keep starting wars after Chechnya and Georgia. And fuck Angela Merkel for doing her “Wilkommenskultur” bit while doing fuck all for both the refugees at the border and the countries that were supposed to hold the border.
And fuck Friedrich “Zweite Mal” Merz too.
I’m not disagreeing, I’m just saying Merz is going to be worse.
I also think she could reasonably believe to be working towards mostly the right goals in general, even if I still mostly disagreed with her.
Her policies regarding Russia appeared right to a lot of people at the time. It’s easy to judge her in hindsight, but “Wandel durch Handel” has been the German way of dealing with Russia since 1969 and it served us well for a long time.
Regarding the refugee crisis, she did want to reach an EU consensus to distribute people instead of just stupidly insisting on the dysfunctional Dublin rules. Other countries dug their heels in though.
Regarding the refugee crisis, she did want to reach an EU consensus to distribute people instead of just stupidly insisting on the dysfunctional Dublin rules. Other countries dug their heels in though.
I know that she had a part in the cleanup once the problem became big enough for her. I’m talking of her initial decision to say “wir schaffen das” and how thoroughly that fucked European labour and freedom.
From a different perspective, how it looked like was she exacerbated an existing crisis to the point that a sizeable number of asylum seekers on the border weren’t Syrian, and distributing people afterwards was looking at others to help solve her mess. She cemented the power of right-wing idiots who played off of her idiocy to scare their people, and especially looking back, it really looks like the same right-wing idiots bent over backwards to provide cheap labour to the German car industry.
And now, when the good years are over, that same car industry is using the low wages perpetuated by said right winger asshats to screw over German labour, by closing German factories but not Polish or Hungarian ones.
To me it looks like she’s either an idiot for letting this happen, or a villain for making it happen.
Sorry, but you are repeating right-wing nonsense here yourself. The syrian refugees had an neligible impact on European labour or “freedom”, what ever you mean with that exactly…
There was certainly some mishandling of those new arrivals, but that was mostly due to right-wing local governments who dragged their feet and obstructed were they could.
The much bigger issue that was Merkel’s fault is that she got scared of her own courage and entered into these shady blackmail deals with Erdogan later on.
Sorry, but you are repeating right-wing nonsense here yourself. The syrian refugees had an neligible impact on European labour or “freedom”, what ever you mean with that exactly
I mean Merkel’s buddy Orbán just killed off the free press just like he killed off worker’s rights for Merkel’s industry buddies in Hungary after the refugee crisis - made worse by Merkel, exploited by Orbán. And now, Merkel’s industry buddies are closing factories in Germany and still opening new ones in Hungary, because they can defer overtime pay for three years and can pay in a currency that loses value continuously against the EUR.
And I very much reject being called out for dissing Syrians, they were the primary victims in all this, along with the Hungarian and the German worker.
I’m just saying there are too many coincidences where Merkel’s actions benefited Orbán and vice versa, and that actions were only taken against Orbán in the EU in any meaningful sense after Merkel left.
Ok, I can generally agree on that, but lets please not mix Syrian (or other) refugees into that, because those are really two different issues. Most of them are not employed in the sector you talk about, and in total numbers they make up an insignificant part of the work force anyway.
