Published on
30/06/2026 - 11:32 GMT+2
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."
