SCHROEDER IS LEADING GERMANY TO DISASTER, writes Rosemary Righter in The Times. Excerpt:

Revolt is in the air. The most, perhaps the only, popular people in Germany are its satirists; and German satire, when it gets going, is robust verging on nasty. The “shirt game” is gentler, but its message is unmistakable. In response to the 48 different tax increases, on everything from flowers to fuel oil, announced since September by a Chancellor who only last July declared that “tax rises make no economic sense” in a slump, the web designer Christian Stein suggested that people should solve Herr Schröder’s financial worries by sending him the “shirts off their backs”. The response has been such that he predicts that the Chancellor, compared in one of the less vitriolic epithets around to a bad case of athlete’s foot, will have 50,000 of them in his wardrobe come Christmas.

The Germans also want their deutschmark back. It turns out — as became known when C&A, in an inspired bit of marketing, invited Germans to spend their “useless” marks in all its branches this week — that they hated surrendering the currency so much that they still have €8.8 billion stashed under their mattresses. The euro — and, by extension, “Europe” — is becoming equated with national disaster.

There is a queasiness about that goes beyond the dyspepsia induced by this particular winter’s discontents. That could be a good thing if it means that a truth evident to others for some time is finally sinking in. This is that the postwar German system, in which this most systematic of nations has placed its trust, is not just in need of a tonic but is fatally diseased. Not only that, but the quack medicines being administered will make its eventual demise a messy, expensive, and needlessly, humiliatingly, miserable business. . . .

The breakdown is not just economic, but political. The election turned not on hard facts about the economy, but on Herr Schröder’s crude manipulation of anti-Americanism. Germans have turned on their own man for now, but the less able they are to face facts, the more tempting it will be to hunt scapegoats outside Germany. That would be the most alarming development of all.

Can things really be that bad in Germany? And since when did Steven Den Beste start writing for The Times under a pseudonym?