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After the national team’s embarrassing World Cup exit, Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz caused confusion with a post on the social media platform X. The chancellor praised the national team: “Even though going out hurts: what a game. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you have thrilled our country. We are proud of you.”
Merz’s post attracted a great deal of criticism in the comments. Comedian Oliver Pocher also spoke up on the social media platform Instagram beneath the chancellor’s post. “I hope the account has been hacked. But it fits the situation in this country,” he wrote. There was “nothing to sugar-coat” about the defeat, nobody had been thrilled. Germany had disgraced itself and produced a “catastrophic performance”. If a chancellor writes such a fundamentally wrong analysis on Instagram in the middle of the night, Pocher said, you can only worry about how he assesses other issues as well.
Germany’s captain Kimmich sums up the mood like this: “I know Germany from watching television as a child, and we were always in the semi-finals, the final. Of course you want to be able to give that to the children, to the people and to the current generation, and the fact is that we could not give that to all the people back home. That is very, very sad, especially at a time in Germany when it would do us extremely good to have something we can be proud of. Sadly, the national team is not that, and we all bear responsibility for it.”
The Bayern Munich star continued: “We players who were on the pitch messed this up; it was not the coach, not the media, not the referee and not the opposition, it was solely us.”
Most fans on X also take a much more critical view of Germany’s World Cup exit, as the performance against Paraguay was poor and culminated in the first World Cup penalty shoot-out defeat in German football history.
At least Karl Lauterbach (SPD) offers a similarly quirky take on the World Cup exit as the chancellor.
The international press is also far less enthusiastic than Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU). The daily WELT quotes the 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 used to be.” The Italian sports paper La Gazzetta dello Sport is quoted by WELT as saying: “Germany flop. Nagelsmann failure.”
Merz’s verdict on X: that was nothing. The tabloid Bild sums it up accordingly: “Merz makes a fool of himself with his post.”