Germany Is Losing Its Mojo. Finding It Again Won’t Be Easy
Can&#x27;t see the full article text because I&#x27;m not going to pay for Bezos&#x27; opinion rag and the archive link isn&#x27;t working for me right now but it&#x27;s certainly <i>a choice</i> to single out Germany in the middle of the second year (fourth if you consider the pandemic as the beginning of it rather than the invasion of Ukraine, which removed Russia as one of the most important trading partners) of an ongoing global recession and open it by suggesting it&#x27;s the government&#x27;s fault.<p>While it&#x27;s true that the coalition is weak, that is largely the result of the logical third partner, the party <i>Die Linke</i> having self-sabotaged itself during the election season and feeding into the US-style smear campaign of the German right against the Greens (case in point: the most widely read German newspaper, <i>Bild</i>, and its more white-collar sister newspaper <i>Die Welt</i> routinely single out Green politicians due to the obvious political leaning of its owner, Axel Springer). The only remaining potential partners would have been the Christian <i>Union</i>, which we&#x27;d been stuck with for 16 years at that point, or the neoliberal FDP, which on paper looked like a perfect match but chickened out of literally the same coalition four years prior after being told that being in a coalition means making compromises.<p>So the result existed on a knife&#x27;s edge since the start and has basically been held hostage by the FDP, which chickened out of most of its progressive campaign promises that would have aligned them with the other two (even the self-ID law in its final draft is a far cry from what was promised and the cannabis legalization is going to be extremely conservative if it happens at all). Meanwhile the government has to deliver on the various commitments made by the previous government.<p>Angela Merkel, while apparently seen as a progressive internationally, was best known for being <i>static</i>: her biggest accomplishments during the Eurocrisis and the &quot;migration crisis&quot; were seen to be her reluctance to act quickly and instead be extremely reluctant and measured in any response. This worked fine for the most part (while of course resulting on a lot of missed opportunities: the conservative <i>Union</i> led government all but abolished subsidies on solar, killing off the nascent renewable energy industry that had sprung up after these subsidies were launched by a red-green coalition several years prior). However during the early months of the pandemic, her measured and science-based approach (she famously holds a degree in physical chemistry) was at odds with the federal and state-level demands for action while at the same time state-level leaders of her party were using the opportunity to position themselves as her successor when it became clear she didn&#x27;t want to run for office again.<p>One such example of delivering on the previous government&#x27;s promises is the action on climate change: the previous government committed to goals that can not be reached without significant changes to cut down on emmissions, but any change to do this is portrayed as Green zealotry. So we&#x27;re now headed to meet only 98% of the goals (which were already much lower than what scientific consensus says is necessary) but the public impression is that the government is going overboard and giving the Greens free reign. Meanwhile the conservative <i>Union</i> is publicly flirting with the right-wing <i>AfD</i> and enjoying not being in the driver seat this time.<p>For the record, I don&#x27;t even like the Green party but they&#x27;re being used as the scapegoat for the coalition government trying to do the bare minimum (i.e. meeting the goals set by the conservative coalition preceding it) while constantly having to make concessions to the neoliberal FDP (which has no problem publicly airing its grievances).<p>So what I&#x27;m trying to say is that the economy in Germany isn&#x27;t stagnating because of the government but because of the global ongoing recession and that the government isn&#x27;t &quot;weak&quot; because of something it can fix but because of right-wing populism (which much like elsewhere was sent into overdrive during the first year of the pandemic) and having to rely on an unwilling coalition partner constantly threatening to ruin everything if it doesn&#x27;t get its way. Just focussing on a &quot;strong government&quot; as the solution to this didn&#x27;t end well last time we had an unstable government during an economic crisis (hint: that was nearly a hundred years ago, you may have read about it in a history book).<p>EDIT: Another FDP-ism worth mentioning is that the center-left SPD and the Greens would be fine with raising taxes to pay for subsidies and improving social welfare programmes while the FDP neither wants taxes to be raised nor additional debt to be accrued, effectively insisting on austerity (which as previously linked on HN is scientifically proven to be detrimental to a country&#x27;s stability and economic well-being but usually involves wages decreasing and public services being privatized, i.e. sold off to big corporations and wealthy investors).