Germany’s Confidence Is Shattered and Its Economy Is Kaput
As long as Germany’s economy was growing, brushing aside the financial crisis and the eurozone debt crisis, there was no pressure to course-correct, said historian Timothy Garton Ash, author of “Homelands,” a history of Europe in the past 50 years.
“Germany woke up last because they were doing best,” he said. “It’s a critique of the political, business, and, to some extent, intellectual elites because it would have been their role to look ahead and see the coming challenges.”
“The problem with consensus societies is that sometimes the consensus is wrong, and when it is, there is no corrective mechanism,”
said Wolfgang Münchau, author of “Kaput—The End of the German Miracle,” published late last year.
When Merkel let in hundreds of thousands of Middle-Eastern, Central-Asian and African asylum seekers stranded between Greece and Hungary in 2015, many Germans welcomed the move, flocking to train stations to greet the new arrivals.
“The border stayed open, not because Angela Merkel deliberately decided so, nor anyone else in the federal government,” writes Alexander. “At the crucial moment, there was simply no one willing to take responsibility for closing it.”
German leaders have grasped opportunities and taken risks in the past. Chancellor Helmut Kohl pushed for reunification, despite misgivings in Paris and London.
Faced with record unemployment, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder unveiled unpopular labor market and welfare reforms that put the economy on a 20-year growth path.
Bertrand Benoit Wall Street Journal 21 February 2025
Even by Germany’s normally morose standards, the mood here ahead of Sunday’s election is gloomy.
Tempers are flaring over a seemingly intractable migration crisis, anxiety is mounting about the economy’s abysmal state, and nerves are fraying over fraught foreign relations.
Worst of all is a nagging suspicion that this election won’t solve any of it.
In the decade since then-Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates for refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere, migrants have arrived by the hundreds of thousands each year. Germany hosts north of 2.5 million asylum seekers, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, including roughly one million who fled Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
“We can do it!” Ms. Merkel famously declared in 2015.
Joseph C. Sternberg Wall Street Journal 20 February 2025
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/dark-clouds-over-the-german-election-policy-politics-48f97a56
Tillbaka till Rolfs länktips 21 Februari 2025
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/02/rolfs-lanktips-21-februari-2025.html
Kommentarer