cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61295662
Germany’s next chancellor signaled his willingness to provide Ukraine with long-range Taurus cruise missiles, marking a potential shift in Berlin’s military support as Kyiv continues to press for more high-precision weapons to hit deep into Russian-held territory, The Financial Times reported on April 13.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the expected successor to Olaf Scholz said that Germany should participate in supplying Taurus missiles if a joint decision is reached with European allies.
“Our European partners are already supplying cruise missiles,” Merz said. “The British are doing it, the French are doing it, and the Americans are doing it anyway.”
“This must be jointly agreed. And if it is agreed, then Germany should take part,” he added.
[…]
I think he’s been fairly steady on the Taurus topic, no?
Yeah, he and his party have steadily talked about delivering Taurus, to then initiated votes in parliament that did get much less yes votes in total then just Merz’ party alone had. He talked loudly about how he would totally send Taurus if he had to decide. Now he has to decide so he moved to goalposts to “Europeans need to decide it”. And he will continue like this.
He was also very steady on the absolute non-negotiability of Germany’s debt brake for years and through the last election campaign… until he negotiated the biggest debt package in Germany’s history days after the election, then pushed it through with the still existing old parliament (and with the exact same parties he refused to even discuss this for years) as he doesn’t have the majority in the new parliament.
Speaking of the new parliament… with right-wing morons now the second biggest party because Merz spend years parroting their talking points. All while steadily rejecting the idea to ever work with them. Until he tried to push an anti-immigration package through with their votes just two weeks before the election. Then he turned around and pretended that he did not cooperate with them as he would obviously never do this… oh and the 100 thousands of protesters spontaneously taking to the streets all over the country because of that massive breach of his word and the historical precedence of voting through legislation with the far right were called insane lefties and paid actors (also insinuating that they should not ahve their consitutional right to protest).
In short: Merz lies when he opens his mouth. He’s basically what you get when you order Trump on Wish (not coincidently his inner circle spend a lot of time in the last years forging good connections to MAGA morons, learning from them how to campaign on culture war bullshit and lies… also in a similar vein those same people are -now that speaking too favorable about Trump would cost them votes for now- already advocating a normalisation of that other group of Putin puppets, the far-right AfD).
Mark my words Taurus will be delivered under Merz to Ukraine before the war ends. Of course he will consult european allies. He will use the coalition of the willing to give more missiles to Ukraine together with other nations like the UK or France. I highly doubt any input of Slovakia or Hungary are gonna matter.
I was talking about Taurus but okay.
Was mentioned in the rant.
I’m aware. I’m also very well aware of what kind of terrible person Merz is and that wall of text was not needed as an answer to my question. In fact however, his stance on Taurus has been firm (by his standards) and I can’t really fault him for that. I think the user replying noticed that which is why he went overboard with everything that’s wrong with Merz because they couldn’t write that his Taurus stance is okay, actually.
More or less, but he’s been dithering in much the same way that Scholz did, albeit accompanied by harsher rhetoric v/ Russia:
However, so far, Merz just needed to voice contrarian viewpoints. He needs to come up with own ideas now.
He has also been fairly steady on the topic of new goverment dept, would you like to take a wild guess what he did right after the election?
He hasn’t been steady on that at all. His flip flopping around the Schuldenbremse topic ahead of the election was completely erratic.
He was indeed not completely consistent, but he never mentioned a 900bn€ package to sidestep the debt brake. He dithered between “absolutely no changes, the others are idiots and I will solve this with my superior instinct for economics and cutting social systems” and “maybe loosen it up a little bit but continued austerity is the goal.”
He said while talking to Süddeutsche Zeitung that he would be fine with doing away with the Schuldenbremse if it’s done for investments and infrastructure, which is pretty much what happened and the next day he was back on the party line saying there would be no reform.
There is no other word for it than erratic. However to anyone familiar with politics it was obvious that they had no other chance than to reform the Schuldenbremse because their program for the election had no other way to finance itself.