After the national team's embarrassing World Cup exit, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has caused astonishment with a post on the platform X. The chancellor praises the national team: “Even though going out hurts: what a match. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you have 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 was “nothing to sugar-coat” about the defeat, no one had been thrilled. Germany had embarrassed itself and delivered a “catastrophic performance”. If a chancellor produces such a wrong-headed analysis on Instagram in the middle of the night, Pocher says, people can only worry about how he assesses other issues.
Germany’s captain Kimmich sums up the mood like this: “As a child I knew Germany from television, and we were always in the semi-finals, the final. Of course you want to be able to give that to the children and people now, to the current generation as well. The fact is that we couldn’t give that to all the people back home, and that is very, very sad, especially at a time when in Germany it would do us enormous good to have something we can be proud of. Unfortunately the national team is not that, and we all share responsibility for that.”
