September 25, 2026

Article by Werner Rügemer, published September 23, 2026, on translator and publisher Fausto Giudice’s substack. Born 1941 in Germany, Rügemer is the author of “BlackRock Germany: The Secret Global Power, Its Practices in Germany and Friedrich Merz,” Berlin, 2025, along with other books about BlackRock and the centralization of finance capital worldwide.

Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz is by far the most unpopular head of government in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Even before the current 2026 regional elections, Merz himself polled even lower than his own party, at 84 percent disapproval.

Now, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] has been halved; the same happened in the capital, Berlin; in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU even disappeared entirely from the state parliament, with less than 5% of the vote [the minimum for proportional representation].

Merz, selling off Germany, Phase 1: The Mittelstand [Small business enterprises with less than 500 employees]

Merz organized this political collapse himself. Since 2005, he has been the leading architect of Germany’s impoverishment, tied to the dismantling of democracy and the welfare state.

In 2005, the U.S. corporate law firm Mayer Brown recruited him for its new branch in Germany, in Düsseldorf. The private-equity-type U.S. investors then flooding into Germany needed knowledgeable advice: how to buy and exploit the most valuable Mittelstand companies?

The leading CDU politician, Merz — chairman of his party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag until 2004 — was especially well suited: no one knew the CDU’s traditional economic backbone, the Mittelstand, better than he did. And he was a lawyer. And, quite unusually for the industry, he immediately became a co-owner of the firm as well. …

For the rest of the article, go to: Why doesn’t-Merz-resign?

Article in: Deutsch – English – Français – Español – Português – Italiano