It’s been a grim election season in Germany. Spanning the harsh winter months, the campaign — set off by the collapse of the government in December — has played out against a backdrop of short days, low temperatures and dark moods. The poor level of political debate has done little to lift the country’s spirits.
For a brief spell, taxes, jobs and government spending — the meat and drink of electoral contest — got most of the attention. But in late January an Afghan attacked a kindergarten group in a Bavarian town, killing a toddler and a bystander. The incident set off a political storm that eclipsed everything else.
Politicians jumped right in. Friedrich Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, introduced to Parliament a nonbinding proposal for stricter border controls and a crackdown on illegal immigration. To pass the motion, he relied on the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany. There was uproar. The center-left Social Democrats and the Greens cried foul, casting themselves as bastions against the rise of extremism.
The debate simmered away through February. That was until last Friday, when Vice President JD Vance made an incendiary speech at the Munich Security Conference, lambasting European governments for lax migration policies and their supposed censorship of the far right. Germany was shocked, plunged into deep anxiety about its relationship with an increasingly hostile America.
This is troubling enough. But with all the recent commotion, the country has lost sight of another problem that is just as pressing as immigration or the decline of the trans-Atlantic alliance: a faltering, flatlining economy. Two years into a recession, Germany is trapped in a vicious cycle of poor growth and low productivity, and nobody seems to know what to do about it. Whatever the result on Sunday, the country is in serious trouble.
There’s agreement, to be fair, on one point: The threat of permanent decline is real. Businesses are burdened by high energy prices, excessive bureaucracy and increasing competition from China. An aging population means that there are fewer highly qualified workers to fill important jobs. Years of underinvestment in infrastructure are taking a toll. In a looming global trade war, Germany’s export-oriented economy stands to lose more than others. A jury of economists and journalists, appointed to name the “business word of the year” for 2024, considered the likes — translated into English — of “bureaucracy monster” and “transformation backlog.” In the end, it settled on “deindustrialization.”
Article by:Source:
