After the national team’s embarrassing World Cup exit, Chancellor Friedrich Merz caused astonishment with a post on the platform X. The chancellor praised the national team: “Even though going out hurts: what a match. With your commitment and team spirit at this World Cup you have thrilled our country. We are proud of you.”Merz’s post drew heavy criticism in the comments. Comedian Oliver Pocher also weighed in under the chancellor’s post on the social media platform Instagram. “I hope the account has been hacked. But that fits the situation in this country,” he wrote. There was “nothing to sugarcoat” about the defeat, no one had been enthused. Germany had embarrassed itself and delivered a “catastrophic performance”. If a chancellor writes such a completely wrong analysis on Instagram in the middle of the night, Pocher said, you can only worry about how he assesses other issues as well.Germany captain Kimmich sums up the mood after the World Cup exit as follows: “I know Germany from watching on television as a child – it was always semi-finals, finals. Of course you want to be able to give that to children and people and to the current generation as well. The fact is that we couldn’t give that to everyone back home, and that’s very, very sad, especially at a time when it would do us extremely good in Germany to have something we can be proud of. Unfortunately the national team isn’t that, and we all bear responsibility for it.”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 us.”Most fans on X also take a far more critical view of the World Cup exit, as the performance against Paraguay was poor and culminated in the first lost World Cup penalty shoot-out in German football history.At least Karl Lauterbach (SPD) assesses the World Cup exit in a way that is just as original as the chancellor:The international press is also less impressed than Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU). The daily WELT quotes Spanish sports newspaper Marca as follows: “Germany is no longer Germany. At two consecutive World Cups they have been knocked out in the group stage – an unprecedented feat. (…) As we said: Germany is no longer what it once was.” The Italian specialist journal La Gazetta dello Sport is quoted by WELT as writing: “Germany flop. Nagelsmann failure.”Verdict on Merz’s initial post on X: it was a flop. The tabloid Bild sums it up accordingly: “Merz makes himself look ridiculous with his posting.”In the meantime, people around the chancellor have offered an explanation for the heavily criticised post. According to the Tagesspiegel, government circles are portraying it as a mistake. The federal press office had prepared several possible social media reactions to the match. However, the version that was published overnight was not the one actually intended, but the wrong post.According to the Tagesspiegel, the chancellery said: “Wrong tweet, wrong timing, wrong button.” The incident had therefore been “unfortunately very annoying”.Twelve hours after his first post and the many negative reactions, the chancellor spoke up again. On X he wrote: “We celebrate victories together. And in defeat we stand together. That makes us strong. Anyone who wears the eagle on their chest deserves our backing and not our mockery.”The chancellor’s X debacle and the national team’s World Cup disaster – for many people in Germany, both are likely to be symptomatic of the state of the country as a whole.