Moreover, the YouGov poll has shown that 35% of Germans thought the CDU would do better in the elections without Merkel as their candidate Of course, polls can be misleading, and Merkel still has six months to go until the elections—but when she said this would be her hardest election yet, she wasn’t lying.
However, the fact that both the German population and her own political allies are growing increasingly tired of Merkel’s ways has been reported by a wide variety of media sources across the globe, including the Huffington Post. As for the CCN, this network openly admits that Angela Merkel may be the biggest loser of 2017. In turn, the American Spectator would describe Merkel as the second worst German Counselor in the post-WWII period after Gerhard Shröder, noting she’s not a bad person, but she is a failure.
It’s curious that Martin Schulz’s appointment as the Social Democrats’ (SPD) candidate to run against Merkel has energized Germany’s September election race and those in his party daring to think they could unseat her. Reuters would note that even though the prospect of a heavily left alliance is a long shot, it has made some conservatives frankly worried.
If German elections were held today, then Martin Schulz would have gotten 50% of all votes, with Merkel barely reaching 34%, the polls show.
According to the Aachener Zeitung, Germans sympathize with Schulz because of his honesty. Schultz openly talks about his past: he does not have a higher education and has no experience in heading public administrations; besides, he is a former alcoholic. However, all the attempts that his political rivals have made so far to use these facts of his biography against him have had little to no influence on his chances to become the next German Counselor.
In an effort to retain the power in her hands, Merkel has been using a wide array of tricks some of which can be regarded as foul play, including disinformation campaigns and psychological manipulations. Among these one can find various propaganda campaigns launched by a number of media sources controlled by the Chancellor in a bid to scare the population with such delusional notions as the imminent Russian aggression For example, just recently German TV channel ZDF started a hunt on Russian agents that were allegedly sent to Germany under the guise of illegal refugees…
Moreover, some of the tricks she’s been using seems to be taken right out of Obama’s playbook, like the announcements about mysterious “Russian hackers”, who are allegedly prepared to meddle with the upcoming German elections in a bid to steal them. However, that’s where Merkel hit a roadblock as well. According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the Federal Intelligence Service and the Office for the Protection of the German Constitution have been investigating these allegations for over a year, under direct supervision of German Chancellor. However, no evidence of Russia’s attempts to somehow influence German politics has ever been presented.
However, the investigation has unintentionally revealed Washington’s attempt to influence German politicians. It’s been revealed by Tageszeitung that the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was working hand in hand with American intelligence services to spy on the friendly governments of the EU countries. Moreover, the BND has been transferring large amounts of data to NSA, obtained by the wiretapping of German citizens and foreign diplomats. Such intrusive US intelligence activities are now being taken pretty lightly in Germany, as if it was a vassal state, since those facts were reported for the first time back in 2014 by the Suddeutsche Zeitung, but Merkel did everything she could to downplay them.
Against this background, the speech that Merkel delivered in front of a parliamentary commission that was tasked with investigating NSA’s activities in Germany looks particularly outrageous. German Counselor didn’t hesitate a minute to state that the interests of her citizens have always been her highest priority, since she’s been defending their freedom and security, reports Tageszeitung.
It is therefore not surprising that German citizens had enough of Angela Merkel and her lies, as evidenced by an ever increasing number of opinion polls in Germany.
Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
