Tommy Vitor
speaker
4,356 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Tommy Vitor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It's hard out there for a neoliberal right now, Ben. So the traditional conservative CDU party got the largest share of the vote with 28.5%, but they fell short of their 30% goal. Big picture, CDU leader Friedrich Merz will almost certainly become the next chancellor. He's going to have to form a government coalition first.
The good news for him is that he can almost certainly do so just by working with the SPD. That will give them enough support. Uh, votes in the Bundestag to form a government and have a majority. They will not have to include a third political party, which would have made things more complicated. Um, Mertz wants that process done by Easter. Um, so it'll take, you know, several weeks at least.
The most interesting, though, and surprising result of the night was probably the, uh, the leftist... Yeah. which a month ago seemed like they were not going to get the 5% share of the vote they needed to be represented in the Bundestag, but they ended up with nearly 9% of the vote.
They had a huge surge of support at the end after this charismatic young woman leader named Heidi Reckonesh gave a speech denouncing Mertz for putting forward this hardline immigration measure at the Bundestag that passed with a bunch of support from the AFD. Ben, just big picture, what are your thoughts on this result and kind of what it tells us?
It's the coolest thing. Yeah, it's cool. It's so foreign to me as an American. You see them all like up there talking.
You know, it's funny. The reason... I saw that. I kept thinking those were clips from a debate.
Because I was like, why the fuck are they all together?
God, I hope.
I mean, like... We have a clip of that.
Yeah, so just to set it up a little bit, Mertz is an interesting character. He has been in and out of politics for decades. He was in the European Parliament, served in the Bundestag for about 15 years, and left politics in 2009 to go make a shit ton of money in corporate law and business.
He and Merkel, Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, were political rivals, which for a very long time was not a good thing for him because she was like, you know, all consuming political figure. He describes himself as socially conservative, economically liberal.
He's a big supporter of the transatlantic alliance with the U.S., which is what made these election night comments by Merck's so surprising. Here's a clip.
But yeah, in the first term, Trump's first term, I think Europe took kind of like a wait and see approach. I don't know if that's because they were just, you know, biding their time or because, you know, like the Committee to Save America, the Jim Mattis's of the world were kind of whispering reassurances to them at the sidelines of the conference. Now they are just moving on.
No.
That's become a big conversation.
Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest, you know, challenge, obviously the biggest challenge for Mertz going forward is going to be economic growth. Germany is kind of stagnated over the last several years. People are pissed. Energy costs went up in part because of the Russian invasion.
They also have to figure out an immigration policy that can defang the AFD in the right wing and make people feel heard without emulating them. Or as you said earlier, alienating parts of the Social Democratic Coalition in a way that fractures the government. And like coalition governments are great insofar as they force you to.
work together with other parties and they force sort of a more moderate government. But that clearly has allowed these populist movements to thrive and grow on both sides. So we'll see if they can sort of deal with that and mitigate that risk. I'm a little worried with Mertz because he hasn't seemed to be the most deft political operator so far.
Like this move in the Bundestag with the immigration proposal that got the AFD support that was seen as breaking the firewall was Very stupid and seemingly led to the rise of this far left party. Yeah.
Yeah, definitely. But, you know, look, we're not seeing a CDU AFD government. So that's nice.
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