After the national team’s embarrassing exit from the World Cup, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has caused bewilderment with a post on the social media platform X. The chancellor praises the national side: "Even though going out hurts: what a match. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you thrilled our country. We are proud of you."
Merz’s post has attracted heavy criticism in the comments. Comedian Oliver Pocher also weighed in beneath the chancellor’s post on the social media platform Instagram. "I hope the account has been hacked. But it fits the situation in this country," he wrote. There is "nothing that can be glossed over" about the defeat, and no one was thrilled. Germany had disgraced itself and delivered a "catastrophic performance". When a chancellor pens such a fundamentally wrong analysis in the middle of the night on Instagram, Pocher says, you can only worry about how he assesses other issues as well.
Germany captain Kimmich sums up the mood like this: "As a child I knew Germany from television – we were always in the semi-finals, the final. Naturally you want to give that to the kids, to the people, to the current generation as well. The fact is that we weren’t able to give that to everyone back home, and that is very, very sad, especially at a time when it would do us an enormous amount of good in Germany to have something we can be proud of. Unfortunately the national team is not that right now; we are all responsible for that."
