Doug Sheridan Says
Per The Economist, Germans increasingly complain their country is not working well.
Four out of five tell pollsters Germany is not a fair place to live. Trains now run so serially behind that Switzerland has barred late ones from its network.
Doug Sheridan Says
According to the International Monetary Fund, Germany will grow more slowly than America, Britain, France and Spain over the next five years. Such prospects are not going over well.
One big difficulty stems from the energy transition. Germany’s industrial sector uses nearly twice as much energy as the next-biggest in Europe, and its consumers have a much bigger carbon footprint than those in France or Italy.
Cheap Russian gas is no longer an option and the country has, in a spectacular own goal, turned away from nuclear power. And a lack of investment in grids and a sluggardly permit system are hobbling the transition to cheap renewable energy, threatening to make manufacturers less competitive.
To Sum It Up: Few in today’s Germany's government admit to the scale of the task facing the nation. Even if they did, the governing coalition is so fractious that the parties would struggle to agree on a remedy. Germany is increasingly Europe's new sickman.
Our Take 1: Like many other Western nations, Germany suffers from a leadership class and an electorate that insist on relearning the hard lessons of the past. Coasting through the 21st century in pursuit of some quasi-socialist ideal that's certain to fail—even as its national security depends in large part on the brute-force threat of an American military powered by capitalism and motivated by a fierce commitment to freedom—is simply too much to take at times.
Our Take 2: Germany, once a model of efficiency and innovation, is now a cautionary tale of fantasy, complacency and decline. And it's mostly a result of an almost inexplicably self-defeating response to climate change. Only Germans can pull themselves out of their tailspin. Will they?