German Chancellor Claims Alternative Für Deutschland 'Stands in the Tradition of the Holocaust

I write this from the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, just north of Rostock. In three months we’ll have state elections here, and Alternative für Deutschland are far and away the strongest party. The last poll pegged their numbers at 36%. The centre-right Christian Democrats, meanwhile, are weaker here than in any other German state; they’ll be lucky if they scrape by in September with 10% of the vote.

Now, the CDU have never been that strong in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but they owe their particular and present weakness largely to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Since the 2024 election campaign, Merz has taken the Union in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on a steady march down from a high of nearly 20% into the depths of their present misery. Along the way, Merz completed a process begun by his predecessors, Merkel and Scholz, namely the full and total social normalisation of the AfD across East Germany.

This past weekend – as they stare down an impending electoral embarrassment unprecedented in their history – the Meck-Pomm division of the CDU held their state party congress. Things are already bad enough for the poor Union blighters, but to make them worse Merz swooped in to deliver yet another of his bizarre gaffe-ridden speeches. He let slip various strange statements over the course of forty minutes, but one passage of his speech in particular has me thinking that maybe I have had Merz wrong this whole time, and that maybe the man is actually not the most bumbling clown chancellor the Federal Republic has ever had, but rather a deep-cover operative on a secret mission from the AfD to crash and burn the Union with no survivors.