German leader Friedrich Merz kept up his campaign of snide asides against President Donald Trump with a warning to avoid education or work in America due to its “social climate” and alleged lack of job opportunities.
Centre-right globalist-conservative leader and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz used his appearance at a Catholic conference in the city of Würzburg, Bavaria, on Friday to once again ding President Trump with a snide aside, warning young people off considering emigrating to America because “a certain social climate has suddenly developed there”.
In comments that were greeted by laughter and applause, Merz said that while he is a “great admirer of America’s” in general — he is a former chairman of the ‘Atlantic Bridge’ pro-Atlanticist NGO — at the moment his “admiration is not increasing”. Merz said:
I wouldn’t recommend that my children go to the U.S. today, get their education there, and work there, simply because a certain social climate has suddenly developed there… Today, the best-educated people in America have great difficulty finding a job.
The remarks came in spite of U.S. unemployment being lower than Germany’s, and come hot on the heels of what was reported to be a “blowout” jobs report for March, with strong growth in private sector employment. Breitbart News economics editor John Carney said:
This is like an A.I. hallucination but its coming from a purported biological entity. The unemployment rate for college grads ages 20-24 in the US is 5.4 percent. That is below what it averaged in Biden’s final year and below the Obama average.
Merz’s claim is not analysis. It is anti-Trump atmospheric fiction.
Merz’s interjection also strikingly echoes a recently trending series of parody posts by pranksters mocking German attitudes towards the United States. Presented in the form of updates by a patriarchal bureaucrat, the posts make light of the character carefully steering his friends and relatives away from the temptation of high American salaries in favour of the German welfare state while virtue signalling on mass migration.
Chancellor Merz’s presence at the conference was picketed by an “antifa” group, with a 600 soul counterprotest turning up outside the conference centre, and the speech itself was interrupted by hecklers unfurling a “climate crisis” banner, reports Die Welt.
Breitbart News reported earlier this month when President Trump threw some of Merz’s earlier critical remarks, telling the German leader to “fix his broken country” before handing out opinions on the nations of others.
While several European leaders persist with attacking President Trump in a bid to burnish their credentials domestically with voters, it’s questionable whether it has much impact. Within days of Merz lashing out at Trump the last time, research found him to have plummeted to the least popular leader of a major European country, loss popular even than Prime Minister Starmer of Britain and President Macron of France.