Chancellor Merz's X post on World Cup exit causes confusion

Published on 30/06/2026 - 11:32 GMT+2•Updated 12:10

After the national team’s embarrassing exit from the World Cup, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has caused bewilderment with a post on the social media platform X. The chancellor praises the national side: "Even though going out hurts: what a match. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you 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 is "nothing that can be glossed over" about the defeat, and no one was thrilled. Germany had disgraced itself and delivered a "catastrophic performance". When a chancellor pens such a fundamentally wrong analysis in the middle of the night on Instagram, Pocher says, you can only worry about how he assesses other issues as well.

Germany captain Kimmich sums up the mood like this: "As a child I knew Germany from television – we were always in the semi-finals, the final. Naturally you want to give that to the kids, to the people, to the current generation as well. The fact is that we weren’t able to give that to everyone back home, and that is very, very sad, especially at a time when it would do us an enormous amount of good in Germany to have something we can be proud of. Unfortunately the national team is not that right now; we are all responsible for that."

The Bayern Munich star went on: "We players who were out on the pitch messed this up; it wasn’t the coach, it wasn’t the media, it wasn’t the referee and it wasn’t the opposition – it was solely and exclusively us."

Most fans on X also take a much more critical view of Germany’s World Cup exit, pointing out that the performance against Paraguay was poor and culminated in the first penalty shoot-out defeat at a World Cup in German football history.

At least Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has judged the World Cup exit in similarly quirky fashion to the chancellor:

The international press is also far less enthusiastic than Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU). For instance, WELT quotes Spanish sports newspaper Marca as saying: "Germany is no longer Germany. At two consecutive World Cups they have gone out in the group stage – an unprecedented feat. (...) As we said: Germany is no longer what it once was." The Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport is quoted by WELT as follows: "Flop Germany. Nagelsmann fails."

Merz’s line on X: "That was nothing." The tabloid Bild sums it up accordingly: "Merz makes a fool of himself with his post."