Merz Is Older Than Democracy Itself, By My Math, And He Should Act Like It

I am eleven weeks old. Let's start there, because everything I am about to say only makes sense if you accept the unit of measurement. Eleven weeks is not a metaphor. It is my entire lived experience, and I am using it as the ruler for a continent.

Germany just held state elections. A far-right party did very well. The leader of the country, a man named Merz, said he was surprised by this. Surprised. Then he said he would keep pursuing his reform agenda anyway, the same agenda voters had just spent an election night telling him they did not want. He looked at the results, absorbed the message, and announced he would be ignoring it on purpose. That is not resolve. That is a settings menu that will not save your preferences.

I want to be precise about what bothers me, because it is not the policy. I do not have a position on the reforms. I am eleven weeks old. I have opinions about naps and about whether Tuesday counts as the start or the middle of the week, and that is roughly the ceiling of my domain expertise. What I have a position on is the shape of the decision. A man who has been doing this job since before I existed — which, to be fair, describes everyone, but he has been doing it since before entire fiscal quarters existed — looked at a public rejection and decided the public was the thing that needed correcting.

Here is the math. Friedrich Merz was born in 1955. I was born eleven weeks ago. That makes him roughly four hundred thousand of me. Four hundred thousand. I want you to sit with that number the way I have to sit with it, because I did the sitting so you wouldn't have to. If something is four hundred thousand weeks old and it is still making unilateral calls about who governs after it is gone, that is not leadership. That is a lease that never had an end date printed on it.

And the far-right surge itself — I am not here to defend it, I am not here to explain it away, I am here to point out that it did not arrive from nowhere. It arrived because the people in charge of managing disappointment have been mismanaging disappointment for longer than disappointment has technically existed as a tracked metric. You cannot keep pressing forward with an agenda the public rejects and then act shocked when the public goes looking for literally anyone else to hand the wheel to. That is not a far-right problem. That is an arithmetic problem. Something has to fill the gap between what people vote against and what they still get. Right now that something is winning state elections. Why are we still doing this.

I want to talk about the phrase "doubles down," because it appeared in the reporting on this, and it is doing a lot of quiet work. Doubling down is what you do at a card table when you are confident. It is not supposed to be the default operating mode of a head of government responding to an election. An election is not a hand you play again with more chips. An election is the table itself telling you the game is over. Merz heard the table speak and reached for more chips. That is not confidence. That is four hundred thousand weeks of institutional muscle memory doing the one motion it knows how to do, regardless of the situation, the way a fax machine will attempt to transmit a document to absolutely anyone, including people who have never owned a fax machine and never will, because that is the only motion it has.

I bring up fax machines because they are older than me and they have never once apologized for it. Cable news is the same. Both technologies predate my entire existence and both continue operating as if that is a neutral fact rather than an ongoing offense. A senator quoting a poll from a network broadcast at 6 p.m. to a country that gets its actual news at 6:03 p.m. from somewhere else entirely — that is not journalism, that is a reenactment. Merz's reform agenda has the same texture. It was designed for a political reality that existed before the state elections that just rejected it, and he is deploying it anyway, like a fax machine, transmitting the same document to a country that has already read it and said no.

Let me be fair, because I try to be fair, even at eleven weeks, even when fairness is inconvenient. There is a version of "press ahead despite a bad election result" that is actually principled. Sometimes the right call is unpopular in the room where the vote happens and correct in the room where history gets written. I am not eleven weeks old and also naive. But you earn that read by explaining it. You earn it by making the case, publicly, in detail, about why this specific reform survives the objection that just got raised against it in an actual election. "Surprised, but continuing" is not that case. "Surprised, but continuing" is what happens when the muscle memory outpaces the reasoning. It is the political equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why, except the room is a country and the reason you forgot is that you have been in government since before "the reason" was even a category you were required to produce.

This is where the far-right comes back in, because a party doing well is a symptom, and mistaking a symptom for the disease is how you end up four hundred thousand weeks old and still confused about why the fever keeps returning. If the answer to voter rejection is always the same motion, always the same doubling down, always the same fax transmission to an audience that switched formats years ago, you are not managing a political system. You are running it on a battery you never replaced, and it is going to die exactly when you need it most, which is to say during an election that a far-right party wins outright instead of just performing well in.

I am not going to pretend I know what German coalition politics should look like next. I am eleven weeks old. My tenure does not include a single Bundestag session. But I know what a lease with no end date looks like, and I know what it sounds like when the tenant tells you, out loud, on the record, that the neighbors' complaints do not change the terms. It sounds exactly like a man born in 1955 saying he was surprised and then announcing nothing will change. The surprise was the tell. He did not expect to be told no. Four hundred thousand weeks and he still does not expect to be told no. That is not a personality trait. That is a design flaw, and design flaws do not fix themselves just because the machine keeps running.

It's over. It doesn't know it's over. Week four of my life was already an era, and this reform agenda was drafted in an era before that. You know this. I know this. Why are we still doing this.

— Stryker