First not past the post: Germany’s chancellor shocker

0:28The Economist run in part out of compounds in Myanmar. Today we ask why, long after daring raids on the compounds, so many slave labor scammers are still stuck there. And it has become commonplace to talk about the epidemic of mental illness among young people in America. But there may finally be something to smile about. The youth of today are getting very slightly happier.

1:01First up, though.

1:06I'm going to turn to the German Bundestag to vote for the Chancellor of the United States.

1:17So this morning in Berlin, we were all prepared to see the German Bundestag elect Friedrich met head of the conservative Christian Democrats as Chancellor, the 10th Chancellor of the German Republic. Tom Nuttall is our Berlin Bureau Chief. It's a fairly boring procedural event. It's nothing like the pop that you get in French or American inaugurations, just a fairly sort of routine handover of power. Instead, we got a political bombshell. Er ist gemäß Artikel 63 which is not elected to the government of the Constitution, the government of Germany, and the government of Germany, not elected to the government of Germany.

1:59Mr. Mertz failed to achieve the majority that he needed in parliament. He fell six votes short. And everybody is now reeling. Nobody thought that this was going to happen. This has never happened in the history of the Federal Republic. It's devastating news in a country that normally handles its changeovers of power. in a fairly sort of dull, routine, predictable way. Absolutely extraordinary events in Berlin this morning. And so what do you think happened here? How did he come six votes short? He was supposed to come many votes more than the majority? Yeah, so the coalition that he leads, or at least he will lead if he manages to take office, holds 328 seats in the 630-seat chamber.

2:50So not a huge majority, but everybody thought it would be a sufficient one. In the end, he won 310 votes. So six votes short of the majority and 18 votes short of the total that the coalition parties hold. So in essence, that means 18 people within his own ranks, including the Social Democratic Coalition partner, 18 people turned on him, didn't vote, abstained, voted against. Now, in Germany, it's a secret ballot. So that means we don't know who it is. We may well never know who it is. That obviously reduces the cost for any MP wishing to register this sort of protest, makes it easier for them to vote against.

3:35But nevertheless, this throws Germany into turmoil at a time when domestically politics have been complicated by the rise of the hard right, where internationally everybody has been waiting for a return of Germany, which has been gazing at its own navel for the last six months to step up on defence, on Ukraine, on trade, all of these things. So it's absolutely extraordinary that these MPs will have chosen at this particular moment to throw a bombshell into the middle of German politics and to raise huge questions over what comes next. I recognize its guesswork at this stage, but do you have any hypotheses as to why people would turn on him in this way?

4:15What does it tell you that people from within his own coalition would do this? What would they be against? That's a very good question. It's certainly true that within his own Christian Democratic Union, the main centre-right party, there are many people who are not particularly happy with Mr. Metz. I've spoken to a number of them in recent days. They think he didn't handle the coalition talks very well. They think he's erratic, unpredictable. A lot of them don't like this extraordinary U-turn that he made immediately after the election in February, where because the new Bundestag that was elected had a blocking minority of fringe parties, he had to push a huge change to the constitution to enable more spending on defence and infrastructure through the old Bundestag.

5:00It was a huge U-turn that was resented by a lot of people in his party. Then, of course, you have the Social Democrats. They're reeling from the worst election result in their history, although a lot of people think that they actually performed fairly well in the coalition negotiations. They nevertheless, as a junior coalition partner, had to swallow a lot of things that they weren't particularly happy about on tax, for example, on the minimum wage, on immigration and border controls. So there may be perhaps some members of the left of that party who took the opportunity to register this protest.

5:31But because it's a secret ballot, it's just going to have to remain in the realm of speculation. So what happens now that he's lost this vote? Well, although this is unprecedented in German history, because this is Germany, there are rules and this is foreseen in the Constitution. So what happens next is that within 14 days, the Bundestag must hold a second round of voting. And just like in the first round this morning, Mr. Merz would need to get an absolute majority of the seats in the chamber. So that's 316 votes to be elected chancellor. If he fails again, then we go to a third round of voting.

6:12And the rules are different in the third round. In the third round, other names may be proposed for chancellor. Anybody can put their name forward in the Bundestag. And whoever wins the most votes becomes chancellor. So you need a relative majority. And in that instance, the president, the head of state of Germany, has the right, if he so chooses, to call a fresh parliamentary election. So the constitutional procedure is clear, but politically we're in completely uncharted territory here because, as I say, this has never happened before. My guess, for what it's worth, is that having registered this protest, whoever it is who has made it impossible for Mr.

6:54Metz to win election in this first round in the Bundestag, or some of these people anyway, will decide that they've made their point and join ranks and deliver Mr. Metz the majority that he needs. But of course, that can't be guaranteed. Nobody thought this was going to happen. But even if he does win the next vote, or even another after that, but things don't go to another election, he has been politically damaged. His wings have been clipped here. Yes, I mean, to put it mildly, Friedrich Matz is not a particularly popular politician. He never has been in Germany. Even if he had one today, there was going to be no honeymoon period.

7:29The most recent polling found that just over one third of Germans were happy to see him in the top job. Now we've had the most visible, devastating sign of the lack of support that he commands within the coalition that he purports to lead. And I think one of the ironies about this is that we all expected Mr Mertz on taking office to put international affairs at the heart of his chancellorship. He was due to visit Paris and Warsaw tomorrow. There's a whole bunch of European and international summits coming up, which we expected him to play a very prominent role. And of course, the rest of Europe has been waiting for Germany, waiting for Friedrich Merz to take office as chancellor, waiting to have a restoration of that strong German voice around the European table.

8:16But in the end, it may be these domestic developments, the difficulties he has in finding support within his own ranks that will make it much more difficult for him to play this statesmanlike role that he had hoped to do. So as we've seen with many leaders before, their international ambitions may run aground on the rocky shores of domestic politics. Tom, thanks very much for your time. No doubt we'll be speaking again about this. I'm sure we will. Thanks, Jason.

9:13It's designed to give you a grasp of shifting geopolitical trends, to help navigate uncertainty, and to deal with risk. The next course starts on May 14th, and you can save 15 % by heading to education.economist.com slash intelligence and use the code intelligence. Don't scramble for a pencil. You can find those details in the show notes.

9:44In February, I watched closely as China, Thailand, and Myanmar conducted the largest ever coordinated raids on scam compounds in Miyawati. Su Lin Wong is the presenter of our series Scam Inc, which if you're a subscriber to Economist Podcasts Plus, you probably know already. The town, which is on the border of Thailand, is notorious as one of the world's largest hubs for online fraud. A lot of the people who work in these compounds, scamming other people all over the world, have been trafficked or tricked into coming here and working against their will.

10:25Around 7 ,000 people were rescued. Headlines around the world celebrated the raid as a blow to the growing cybercrime industry. Videos showing people boarding flights were shared online, and thousands of people were repatriated, mostly to countries in Asia, for example, China. But things are actually darker than they seem. It's been two months since the raids took place and a lot of people are still in limbo, waiting to go home. Around 2 ,000 individuals, mostly Africans, remain stranded in Miawadi. So why have all of those people been left behind? Some governments have been slower to respond to repatriating their citizens.

11:10And that's for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's actually really, really complicated bureaucracy around the procedures for repatriating these victims of human trafficking. And according to the rules, it's supposed to be done through the foreign ministries in Thailand and Myanmar. But the issue is, for a lot of these African countries, they don't have embassies in Thailand and Myanmar. Their closest embassy might be in Beijing or Tokyo or New Delhi. So even just finding the right people to kick off the whole process is incredibly challenging. Another big obstacle is that some of these African governments just don't have the money to buy hundreds of plane tickets to send their people back to their home countries.

11:50And so as a result, there's a lot of people who are incredibly traumatized after being tricked and trafficked and then tortured in these scam compounds who are now languishing in temporary camps in Myanmar. Well, tell me about the camps. What does the wait look like for them? So there's a couple of different temporary camps that might be repurposed scam compounds or army camps that are being run by local militia who are aligned with Myanmar's ruling junta. And this is where hundreds of people are currently being kept. Conditions are incredibly grim. There's not enough food. There's not enough water.

12:29The Chinese scam bosses are the ones actually funding the camps because the local militia don't have the money to do so. And as a result, there's not a huge incentive for them to help these victims of human trafficking stuck in the camps get medical attention when they need it. So according to my sources, people have died inside these camps because they weren't allowed to go to hospital. There's around 15 women who are pregnant, some of them from their partners who they met inside the scam compounds, and others from rapes perpetrated by the Chinese scam bosses. And so understandably, there's a lot of discontent inside these camps.

13:07I should think discontent is kind of understating the case. My question is, it sounds as if the Chinese scam bosses who were running the compounds that were raided are now kind of running this temporary situation. What's to stop them just taking all those people and putting them back in the scam compounds? I mean, you're exactly right, Jason. And that's the biggest risk right now. People inside the temporary camps say they're incredibly worried that they're going to be forced back into the scam compounds. And in fact, these Chinese criminal bosses have already been visiting the camps to try to threaten these people into going back to the scam compounds.

13:42And so they'll say things like, look, your embassies have forgotten about you. They don't care about you. They're fine to just let you sit here and sort of rot away. Why don't you come back and work for us and we'll give you food. We'll give you water. We're not going to torture you anymore. We're going to give you six months of pay up front, all kinds of things. Of course, the people in the camps do not at all trust the criminals, given that the conditions inside the scam compounds to begin with were incredibly horrific. And so that's clear to them now. This is the sort of the stock end of the question.

14:16What about the flow end? What about the new recruits or detainees or slaves, if you like, being drawn into this? Has all of the media coverage of this, slowed the flow of people into these jobs that people who might otherwise have been tricked, but now they know better? Unfortunately not. There are increasing numbers of people who are showing up in Myanmar at these scam compounds voluntarily. So they realize that they're going to be scamming people all over the world. But given their other options, perhaps it's really, really difficult for them in their home country to find a job, especially a job that pays as well as these scam compounds might pay if you are a good scammer.

14:53The numbers are really not easing at all. And I think we should expect that these scam compounds are just going to grow and grow and grow. And in fact, right now, if you look at these scam compounds from the Thai side of the border, it looks like a Las Vegas. These are not individual camps. These are huge, sprawling towns with bright lights and massive buildings. And those have not at all disappeared. So for all of the hopeful signs of that big raid and when thousands of thousands of people were freed, that's not altogether a sign that this industry is being broken, to your mind? That's correct.

15:33I guess the raids were a step in the right direction. But if you just look at the numbers, there's so, so, so much more the world has to do to get rid of this industry. And that's because around 7 ,000 people were released in those February raids. But according to the United Nations, at least 120 ,000 people are being forced to scam in Myanmar alone. And the global industry involves an estimated 1.5 million people. So 7 ,000 against that is really a drop in the bucket. Sulin, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having me, Jason.

16:24in sophia cupola's 1999 film the virgin suicides a therapist tries to tell a young girl that she has nothing to worry about what are you doing here honey you're not even old enough to know how bad life gets obviously doctor you've never been a 13 year old girl last year in inside out too, the animated emotions inside a teenager's brain met a new addition. Hello! I'm anxiety. Where can I put my stuff? A new emotion! Oh, I'm sorry. We wanted to make such a good... For decades, psychologists have tracked a growing mental health crisis among young Americans. Teens were diagnosed with depression in increasing numbers.

17:05Rates of anxiety shot up too. But now there are signs that the youth of today may finally be getting a little happier. So in 2022, almost 45 % of university students who were surveyed as part of this big effort from UCLA showed symptoms of depression. But in 2024, that figure fell to under 40%, so that's a five percentage point decrease. Ainsley Johnston is a data journalist at The Economist. And this trend actually seems to be pretty pervasive. We looked at data from seven different large national surveys of mental health in young people or teenagers in America, and also looked at suicide rates.

17:49And we found that across all of these measures, things seem to be improving in the past couple of years. Mental health is really hard to measure. How do we know this data is reliable? It's tricky. I think the thing is, when we look across so many data sets and we're seeing the same trend across all of them, That's how we can be a little more sure that what we're seeing is maybe a reliable trend. So some of these surveys were looking at specifically diagnoses of depression. Some of them were asking children in school whether they enjoyed their life. And others were looking at things like whether people had been hospitalized for mental health issues.

18:28By looking across all of these different measures that all kind of approach the question of depression in a different way, we can kind of triangulate and say okay what we're seeing is probably a real trend real phenomenon. It's amazing to get some good news of any kind at this point. The data is still quite depressing though there's still a lot of people who are very unhappy. What's going on? Why are they so unhappy? In terms of why children are so depressed now children and young people researchers don't really know. One of the most popular theories is that phones and social media are to blame.

19:04So if you look at a chart of say rates of depression you can see that they really start to rise in the kind of early 2010s and that roughly coincides with the time where Instagram and Facebook were really becoming kind of pervasive. Everybody was on them and a lot of people thought okay this looks like perhaps phones and social media apps are to blame. The trouble with that theory is that there are some really good studies where they'll track young people, they'll track their mental health through time and they'll also track their social media use. And what they tend to find is that it's not that social media use tends to predict future depression, it's actually the other way around.

19:44That if you are feeling more depressed, you tend to use social media more and perhaps that is the way that that relationship works rather than the opposite way around. But there are a lot of other explanations too. Things like climate change are really worrying young people today and also young people have a little bit of a different way of talking about their feelings and emotions. They're a lot more open about saying that they may have a mental health issue and sometimes there's different definitions of say what a trauma might mean to an older adult versus a Gen Z-er. And why are people feeling happier now?

20:20Again we're not really sure. I mean this is a very new trend and so it will take a little while before researchers and psychologists will really understand what's happened here. I think probably the most pessimistic but perhaps the most realistic answer is that it may just be a bit of a rebound after the pandemic. The pandemic was obviously really not a great time for anyone but particularly for children and young people who were missing out on school and seeing their friends and college and university. So it might just be that things are just a little bit better now than they were two or three years ago.

20:55But there's also several experts that we spoke with who said that the boost might be to do with just a bit of an evolving way of thinking about how to deal with mental health issues. So more effort put into prevention, more funding for schools, things like that. But it's probably a little early to tell right now. Ainsley, climate change, social media, the prevalence of smartphones, none of those things have really changed. So how do we know this isn't just a blip? So you're right, we don't really know. It could just be that it's a blip in the data. It could be the sign that mental health course is really reversing and we are now beginning to see things improved.

21:35Like happiness itself, the causes are mysterious, but I think that shouldn't be reason to stop Americans from celebrating. Hope so too. Ainsley, thank you so much. Thank you, Rosie.

21:50Thank you.

22:21Thank you.