Welcome to the latest episode of ‘Europe in Decay,’ where the continent’s supposed economic engine has finally stalled out, and the mechanics have decided the best way to fix the internal combustion is to demand a physical inspection of every worker’s nasal discharge. Friedrich Merz, the man currently leading the charge for the German conservatives with all the charisma of a high-interest payday loan, has identified the true enemy of the state: the telephone sick note. Because, as we all know, the reason the German economy has been face-planting since 2022 isn’t a catastrophic failure of energy policy, a crumbling infrastructure, or the sheer weight of its own suffocating bureaucracy—it’s because Hans decided to call his doctor from his sofa instead of dragging his feverish corpse into a crowded waiting room.

Merz’s proposal to end the practice of obtaining short-term sick leave via phone is a masterclass in the kind of atavistic, performative cruelty that the Right mistakes for ‘leadership.’ The logic is as sound as a screen door on a submarine: if we make it as inconvenient as possible for people to be ill, they will simply choose to be healthy. It is the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ philosophy applied to viral infections. In Merz’s world, the German worker is a natural-born ‘shirker,’ a lazy parasite just waiting for a chance to exchange a five-minute phone call for a three-day weekend of doing nothing. The solution, naturally, is to force these suspected criminals into the gladiatorial arenas we call GP waiting rooms. There, they can sit for four hours among the truly infirm, exchanging pathogens like trading cards, all to secure a piece of paper that proves they aren’t lying about their migraine. It is a stunning display of bureaucratic necrophilia—clinging to the physical corpse of 20th-century administration while the 21st-century economy burns around them.

But let’s not pretend the Left or the labour unions are the heroes in this farce. Their outrage is equally exhausting, wrapped in the familiar, suffocating blanket of performative victimhood. To hear the unions tell it, being asked to actually see a doctor for a medical certificate is a human rights violation on par with the salt mines. They cry ‘foul,’ claiming they are being ‘treated like shirkers.’ Newsflash: in a system where the state pays you to breathe, the state will always suspect you’re holding your breath for profit. The unions represent a workforce that has become so accustomed to the ‘generous’ cushions of the European social model that they’ve forgotten those cushions are filled with the shredded remnants of their own national competitiveness. They defend the telephone note with the fervor of a religious relic, as if the ability to cough into a smartphone is the final bastion of worker dignity. It’s a pathetic tug-of-war between a boss who wants you to die at your desk and a worker who wants to get paid for dying on his couch.

Meanwhile, the medical profession is having a collective nervous breakdown, and for once, I don’t blame them. Doctors, already drowning in the tidal wave of Germany’s aging population and the labyrinthine paperwork required to prescribe a single aspirin, are now being told they must act as the border patrol for Merz’s productivity war. They are essentially being asked to serve as high-paid bouncers for the economy, sniffing out the ‘skivers’ while their waiting rooms turn into biological hazard zones. The irony is delicious: in a desperate attempt to ‘kickstart’ the economy by reducing sick days, the government will likely increase them by ensuring every person with a minor cold is forced into a room with twenty other people, thereby creating a localized plague that will take out the rest of the office by Tuesday.

This is the state of the ‘EU’s biggest economy.’ It is no longer a powerhouse of innovation or engineering; it is a giant, wheezing nursing home arguing over who gets to hold the remote. Merz looks at a stalled GDP and sees a moral failure of the individual, rather than a systemic failure of his own class. He wants to return to a world of ‘Ordnung’ where everything is stamped, filed, and physically verified, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world has moved on to automated efficiency. The unions, conversely, want to maintain a stagnant status quo where the ‘social market economy’ provides everything while producing increasingly little. Both sides are trapped in a feedback loop of stupidity. The Right wants to punish the sick to please the markets; the Left wants to coddle the idle to please the base. And while they bicker over the validity of a phone call, the actual ‘engine’ of Germany continues to rust in the rain. It’s not just a sick-note crackdown; it’s a suicide note for a nation that has forgotten how to function without a clipboard and a grievance.