For all his faults, and his outsized ego, France’s President Macron has made significant pro-business moves, cut some corporate taxes, and slightly trimmed its bloated welfare state.
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is at least attempting to reform Italy’s stagnant economy. Poland’s economy is easily beating its neighbour, and stealing a lot of its factories into the bargain.
By contrast, Germany is paralysed by a coalition comprising the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats that can agree on almost nothing….
The coalition’s one big idea was splurging €10bn on getting Intel to build a new chip factory in the country in an attempt to drag Germany into the 21st century.
Given the coming glut of semiconductors on the global market, it already looks like a white elephant. Otherwise, Chancellor Scholz’s coalition appears to have no clue how to fix the mess.
Related: Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy. What happened?
For most of this century, Germany racked up one economic success after another, dominating global markets for high-end products like luxury cars and industrial machinery, selling so much to the rest of the world that half the economy ran on exports.
Jobs were plentiful and the government’s financial coffers grew as other European countries drowned in debt, and books were written about what other countries could learn from Germany.
No longer.
Now, Germany is the world’s worst-performing major developed economy, with both the International Monetary Fund and European Union expecting it to shrink this year.
It follows Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the loss of Moscow’s cheap natural gas — an unprecedented shock to Germany’s energy-intensive industries, long the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe.
If only somebody had warned them a few years ago about the dangers of being dependent upon Russian energy. If only.