Timmy the Whale cannot stop beaching himself off the German coast and in this he has become a powerful metaphor for the politics of the Federal Republic

Timmy is the name the German press have given to a confused humpback whale who got himself caught in a fishing net off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in early March. Authorities cut Timmy free in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard.1 An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again. Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace, but soon a whole raft of philanthropists and “whale whisperers” (this is literally what the press called one of them) descended on the problem and the drama of Timmy continues to this moment. The latest subplot unfolded yesterday, as our whale saviours prepared a complex scheme to lift Timmy via air cushions onto a tarp, tie him to pontoons and tug him around Denmark back into the North Atlantic. Alas, a rising tide loosened the hapless Timmy from his sandbar and he swam free, escaping this indignity at least and leaving all the whale-whispering shitheads with nothing to do but give more pointless media interviews. For two hours children across the Federal Republic jubilated as Timmy lurked aimlessly in shallow coastal waters, until of course he beached himself again, provoking a whole new narrative epicycle. The case of Timmy the Retard Whale is oddly captivating. Most obviously it illustrates the naiveté and neotenous emotional incontinence of Germans today, many of whom have countered the pervasive secularisation of society with an exaggerated and childish faith in the overarching sacrality of the natural world and its creatures. The media have constructed a perverse Disney plot out of the endless ups and downs of Timmy’s plight: Now the whale is free! Now he is dying! Now he must be rescued! Now he is free again! Now he is stranded! Now there is hope! Now he is dying! Not only children but plenty of adults have lost themselves in this transparently repetitive drama. At one point a gaggle of dumb women even protested to demand that authorities do more to save our unsaveable humpback – who is of course merely one of perhaps 100,000 humpbacks across the world, the vast majority of whom will die in complete obscurity with nary a news article. In my more delirious moments I wonder if Timmy is not also an omen from on high, a metaphor from the heavens to illustrate for us the ridiculous, circular farce that Germany has become. The Federal Republic concludes the first quarter of the twenty-first century as a bloated, increasingly unaffordable welfare state, governed by a sclerotic political elite who have lost all will for reform. Annual government expenditures now officially exceed 50% of the entire German gross domestic product – a line in the sand where Helmut Kohl once said (however allegedly) that socialism begins.2 Friedrich Merz’s coalition government of centre-right Christian Democrats and hard-left Social Democrats faces an increasingly insolvent pension system, a dysfunctional and increasingly unaffordable public health insurance system, a bloated social welfare system subsidising an ever-growing population of layabouts and bums, a continued stream of illegal migrants, decaying infrastructure, a cancerous bureaucratic apparatus, an insane tax system that appropriates half of everyone’s earnings with ever less to show for it and a vampiric public media behemoth supported by a warren of malicious taxpayer-funded NGOs that run around branding everybody who has a problem with any of the foregoing as an Evil Nazi Hitler Fascist. The pension crisis is the greatest problem of all. In the best of worlds and with even the most capable political leadership, it would still represent an existential challenge to the Federal Republic. Yet as this crisis approached from afar, the state responded not with advance measures to lessen the pain, but with an insane plan to phase out all nuclear power and transition electricity generation to renewables. It is hard to see this in retrospect as anything but a kind of weird displacement reaction. We have spent the last twenty years solving exactly the wrong problem and along the way we have made the real crisis that much worse. The energy transition means expensive energy much more than it means reduced carbon emissions, and expensive energy means deindustrialisation, means a shrinking tax base, means fewer fiscal resources to address the pension crisis, means probably higher taxes, means more productive people leave, means everything gets worse. Before his swearing in, Merz the Pigeon Chancellor vowed an immediate blitz of reforms to address all of these problems. The Social Democrats would not cooperate, so the reform blitz was rebranded into something called the Autumn of Reforms, and nothing happened in the autumn either so Merz felt compelled to christen 2026 the “Year of New Beginnings.” We are now a third of the way through the year and nothing has really begun yet, beyond unsatisfactory half-measures on the pension front, ongoing fruitless debates on welfare reform and new conscription legislation passed with such little care and in such great haste that the government was forced to defang an unnoticed if disturbing provision requiring young men to obtain permission from the Bundeswehr before leaving the country. Meanwhile high energy prices continue to deindustrialise Germany and economic growth remains a hopeless fantasy. The political gridlock will continue into yet a second autumn, as the Christian Democrats await with terror the results of elections in Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Alternative für Deutschland stands on the edge of achieving outright parliamentary majorities.3 It is an interesting question, to ask when is the last time anything big happened on the domestic political front in Germany. The answer is pretty clearly January 2025, when the Christian Democrats in the middle of a desperate federal election campaign flirted with tearing down the firewall and conducted two mostly symbolic votes alongside the AfD. There ensued a fierce backlash from the left and their civil society goons, and since then Merz has clung to the firewall like grim death. The result is a curious paradox that may be very nearly unique in history: The more the electorate shifts to the right, the more federal politics counterbalance towards the left. The voters see the answer, and the politicians respond by giving them everywhere and always exactly the opposite of what they want. There are three reasons for this. The first is the asymmetrical nature of left and centre-right parties in general. As left parties lose supporters to the right, they shrink to an ever more concentrated base of the truly radicalised and committed. They become more leftist and less centrist. Centre-right parties, as they lose supporters to the right, merely shrink to their directionless triangulating core. They become more centre-left and less rightist. Thus you end up with the present government, which consists of leftist true believers harnessed to a bunch of milquetoast centre-right careerists who stand for nothing discernible. Then there are the paradoxical effects of the firewall itself, which divides the Bundestag and all state parliaments in two. The more seats and voters that vanish to the AfD behind the firewall, the greater the share of seats and voters the left enjoys in the socially acceptable portion of parliamentary politics. Left parties together have 56% of the non-AfD Bundestag presently, for example – exactly same share they had at the height of leftist power in Germany after the 2021 elections, when the AfD was much weaker. The parliamentary math thus…