The chancellor urged workers to see welfare cuts not as a “threat” but as “a big chance” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was booed and mocked during a speech on Tuesday to one of the country’s biggest trade union groups as he tried to sell his welfare cut plans. Merz has a history of blaming Germany’s economic troubles on its people. Last August, he said that the “welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed.” In January, he urged Germans to work more, arguing that the “productivity of our economy is not high enough.” He told a gathering of some 400 delegates from the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) that people must pull together because “we simply failed to modernize our country.” Boos and whistles first erupted as he spoke about the health insurance reform approved by his cabinet in April.…