Britain has long been in awe of its continental friend – overlooking one fatal affliction
Source - Daily Telegraph 26/03/20
What ever happened to the German Miracle? Angela Merkel’s final hour has become her lousiest moment. Every day seems to bring fresh calamity. The former chemist, once praised globally for her efficient handling of the pandemic, could yet preside over a higher Covid death toll than Britain. Amid a bizarre smear campaign against AstraZeneca, the third wave of the coronavirus could result in tens of thousands of unnecessary German deaths. The German Chancellor’s tacit support for the EU’s vaccine nationalism, meanwhile, is corroding her country’s benevolent image. Merkel’s authority is now so weakened that she was this week forced into a humiliating U-turn over a five-day Easter lockdown.
Berlin’s implosion is not an event but a phenomenon. Nor is it all Merkel, though she cannot escape the blame. Germany’s ruling class is remote and fractious. The German public is restive and distrustful. Over the last 15 years, Merkel has mellowed into an uneasy mixture between the Queen and Trump; as a symbol of stability, she has just about kept a lid on the country’s divisions.
But for all her “liberal” credentials, she has a surprising taste for flirting with populist sensationalism, most recently her elusiveness over whether she would take the AstraZeneca jab. Such behaviour is particularly destructive given the current state of German opinion. The EU’s vaccine debacle has sent ripples of existential unease through the country. It has been a gift to groups like Querdenken, an alliance between Right and Left, which share a taste for conspiracy theories and distrust in institutions. The far-Right AfD, despite falling in the polls, has shifted the centre of political gravity in its direction, while the Green Party – mislabelled as “conservative” by some commentators, despite its Left-wing pacifist history – is surging to the detriment of the established parties.
As German politics turns toxic, its economic future looks increasingly uncertain. After a 20-year boom powered by artificially competitive exports, courtesy of the euro exchange rate, its analogue industries seem incapable of adapting to the digital age; the Mittelstand, so long envied, by the UK have neither the insight nor the inclination to innovate, while the car industry is falling behind in the shift to electric vehicles.
This picture may come as a surprise to Britons who associate Germany with business prowess and moderation – and have read so many green-eyed columns about Germany’s superior healthcare system and elegant handling of test and trace.
But in our awe of our Teutonic friends, we have overlooked modern Germany’s fatal affliction: complacency. An almost bucolic suspicion of unbridled entrepreneurship, and a refusal to change old ways of doing things, is part of it. I experienced this first hand when I worked for the state broadcaster Deutsche Welle in Bonn a few years ago, and made the mistake of trying to go to the hairdresser. With a kind grimace, the salon owners would look at my curly locks and inform me “Es ist nicht möglich [it is not possible]”. At one establishment, a poor soul who kept dropping their scissors gave up half way through and pretended she had finished. This happened several times until a local friend told me that hairdressing is a guilded industry which offers those who pass the apprenticeship a lifelong gravy train of protection. Eventually I found someone willing to cut my hair in a Turkish neighbourhood.
It is a mundane story, but representative of how Germany has conscientiously ignored the vital domestic challenges of its time. Convinced that it had done everything it needs to sustain a social market economy with low unemployment and a robust manufacturing base, it has bothered to do few of the things that it demanded of its EU underlings, such as improving internal investment or cutting generous entitlements.
Geopolitically, Germany has travelled back in time; Berlin’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels has sucked the country into the orbit of the Kremlin. It has needlessly antagonised the USA with its parasitic attitude to global peacekeeping. Nor is Germany’s troubled past a permissible excuse; Japan may not be allowed to have an offensive military under its constitution and has spent much of the last 40 years hermetically sealed despite becoming a world leader in tech. Nonetheless it is now coming into its own as it helps to hold the line against China.
While many ordinary Germans are starting to sense that the country’s good run is coming to an end, the ruling class is struggling to catch up. They need to hurry. Merkel’s departure – and possible replacement with the limp and unpopular Armin Laschet – is set to be an emotional watershed.
The current EU chaos makes this moment of reflection particularly dangerous. Jean Monnet’s borderless utopia has been fundamental to Germany’s psychological reinvention in the wake of its Nazi nationalist past. Brussels has offered a safe space and safety valve for Germans to harmlessly indulge their national pride and global ambitions. But Brussels’s botching of the vaccine procurement is inviting questions about whether Merkel has failed to prevent the making of a monster.
Euroscepticism is a minority sport in Germany. But if the country and the EU continue to slide into chaos, Berlin's future could take a turn that its fan-club would never have imagined. Germany, then, is one to watch in the coming months, alongside the volatile US. Both look to be condemned to impotent leadership at the crucial moment. But one major difference remains. While a naive confidence burns at America’s core, the German soul is more brooding. It was not just the totality of defeat but a profound capacity for introspection that allowed the land that of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer to accept a need for self-correction after the Second World War. It is a little of that spirit of humility and flexibility – buried under a generation of conceit and delusion – that Germany’s politicians urgently need to rediscover.
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