German Industry Fleeing High Energy Prices, Costs And Bureaucracy In Record Numbers

Because the article is leaving out a lot of information—things Merz has already done, even prior to constituting the new Bundestag, which quite frankly make a mockery of his campaign promises.

Background info: until recently, Germany had what they called Schuldenbremse—a maximum amount that the federal government could borrow in any given fiscal year, expressed as something like 1% of GDP. In fact, this was written into the German Grundgesetz, i.e. the German constitution and therefore required a 2/3rds majority in the Bundestag to change (similar to how constitutional amendments require a 2/3rd vote in the U.S. Senate).

As he was the head of the Christian Democratic Union (a formerly conservative center-right party), Merz campaigned on a promise of reining in out of control government spending, which was what had actually brought down the previous coalition government (which was dissolved prematurely last December—so instead of federal elections taking place in September of this year as originally scheduled, they took place on 2/23). It’s important to additionally point out that a principal reason why the previous governing coalition failed was due to their reckless spending—which Merz openly criticized, and which he used as a major campaign promise to help him get elected (the other major promise was to close Germany’s borders, rather than continuing to allow the endless flood of “asylum seekers” of unknown origin, and the sharp rise in severe violence and even multiple acts of terrorism in Germany in just the last year).

Once his Union party received a plurality of votes and it looked like they would be able to form a majority coalition with the social democrat party (SPD), Merz completely reversed all his promises. To outside observers it essentially looked as if Merz wanted to be chancellor so badly, that he was prepared to throw everything under the bus and compromise every principle and every campaign promise he’d made just days prior.

The thing that registered Union party were probably most upset about was not merely that he’d blatantly lied to them, but the extreme to which he was subsequently willing to go. Let me try to summarize:

The SPD (which led the previous, since dissolved governing coalition) agreed to being the junior party in the new coalition, provided Merz fulfilled a number of their expectations, chief of which was to amend the German constitution and remove the debt ceiling (which was a major source of contention in the prior government). But the only way to effect this change was by making use of the (technically dissolved) previous government, whose role was historically limited to an administrative role until the new government was constituted, which by German law has to happen within 30 days of the election. The reason was that only in the old government did the Union and the SPD, together with the Greens have enough reps for a 2/3rds vote (in the new/incoming government they no longer had enough votes).

So in other words, the Union used the outgoing, technically dissolved government, whose purpose was essentially to guarantee a smooth transition from the old to the new governing session, in order to make not one, but actually several (at least two, maybe more) constitutional amendments:

To remove the debt limit.For this, they needed the additional votes of the Greens representatives (to achieve a 2/3rds majority). The Greens in turn had their own set of demands, chief among which was the requirement to add a “Net Zero by 2045” mandate into the German constitution (!).
There are even more details, but this is already way more than I intended to type. Suffice it to say, Merz absolutely broke his campaign promises in the most reckless and shamelessly self-serving way possible, effectively trampling over every core principle that his “center-right” Union party once held dear, and all this happened before the coalition negotiations even began, since the constitutional amendments formed the requisite basis for coalition negotiations demanded by the SPD.

Oh yeah, and that Net Zero by 2045 in the German Grundgesetz is a real doozy. Many critics predict that it will make any possibility of infrastructure improvements (dilapidated, collapsing bridges, etc.) impossible, because being in the German Basic Law, the Net Zero mandate is now technically at the same level of legal precedence as the small number of core rights (e.g. freedom of speech) for which the Grundgesetz was intended.

I hope by now everyone who’s read this far has some appreciation of the level of absurdity of what just transpired in the last week or two in Germany, where the entire incoming coalition government decided to go full retard even before the start of the new legislative period.