Predictably, his language was dismissed as inflammatory. According to Verena Hubertz, of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary group, the “bizarre speech is more beer tent than Dax-listed company executive”, while Sandra Detzer, for the Greens, said bashing politicians would “damage our political culture and the prestige of the German economy”.
Well, perhaps. And yet all Weimer was really guilty of was the kind of plain talking that British business leaders used to be well known for before they were captured by woke posturing, and restricted themselves to Left-wing, big state platitudes. And Weimer was completely right: the German economy is paying the price for a decade of policy mistakes and for complacently assuming that 20th-century heavy industry could sustain it forever.
Under the vastly overrated Angela Merkel, who despite the praise heaped on her by the Remain establishment has left a disastrous legacy, Germany made two major policy mistakes.
First, it based its economic model on cheap Russian gas, fuelling an industrial machine built on chemicals and automobiles that requires huge amounts of energy (one BASF plant consumes more gas than the whole of Switzerland). Its nuclear plants were closed down on a whim, fracking was ignored even though Germany has abundant shale oil and gas, and wind and solar power were not built quickly enough to replace it.