The mess Merkel leaves behind | The Economist - 0 views
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Mrs Merkel’s achievements are more modest. In her 16 years in the chancellery she has weathered a string of crises, from economic to pandemic. Her abilities as a consensus-forger have served her country and Europe well.
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when a new government forms after an election this weekend, admiration for her steady leadership should be mixed with frustration at the complacency she has bred.
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The public sector has failed to invest adequately or wisely, falling behind its peers in building infrastructure, especially the digital sort.
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Penny-pinching is hard-wired into the state. In 2009, on Mrs Merkel’s watch, Germany hobbled itself with a constitutional amendment that makes it illegal to run more than a minute deficit. With interest rates so low, sensible governments ought to have been borrowing for investment, not fainting at the first spot of red ink.
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Germany’s most severe domestic problem is a failure to reform its pension system. Germans are ageing fast, and the baby-boomers will place an even heavier burden on the budget later this decade as they retire
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Germany has also been sluggish, and still emits more carbon per head than any other big EU country, not helped by Mrs Merkel’s shutdown of Germany’s nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
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The EU has not grappled sufficiently with the weakness of its indebted southern members. Only during the pandemic did it create a financial instrument that lets the EU issue jointly guaranteed debt, and dispense some of the cash as grants, rather than yet more loans.
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Despite recent increases, it spends too little on defence. It cosies up to Beijing in the hope of better trading terms. It is giving Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a chokehold over European energy supplies by backing the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which, as it happens, makes landfall in Mrs Merkel’s own constituency.
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China is an increasingly challenging economic and strategic rival, Russia an unpredictable threat and America a distracted and uncertain ally.
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Worse, the “stability” rules that will force countries back into austerity to shrink their stocks of debt are ready to revive, unless amended.
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The polls suggest that Germany is set for a messy new parliament, with no single party, or even two, able to form a government. Instead, some sort of ideologically incoherent three-way coalition is on the cards—one that, by combining high-spending greens and pro-business liberals, may struggle to agree on anything ambitious.
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Comfortable, cautious Germans seem uninterested in serious debate about the future. Crisis-management has become a substitute for initiative. Candidates have no incentive to highlight their country’s looming problems.
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One is a coalition headed by Mrs Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister-party (the CDU/CSU), led by Armin Laschet. The other is a coalition led by Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats (SPD), who is Germany’s finance minister. In either case, the coalition would be joined by the Greens and by the pro-business Free Democrats.
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Sixteen years in power has been enough. The party has run out of ideas and drive, as its decision to choose the gaffe-prone and uninspiring Mr Laschet for chancellor makes clear. An affable lightweight, he has run a dismal campaign, and is predicted to lead his team to its worst result since the second world war. The polls say that Mr Scholz is preferred by twice as many voters.
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The problem is that although he belongs to the business-friendly wing of his party, the SPD is stuffed with left-wingers.
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They may try to drag him further in their direction than the Free Democrats will wear and enterprise can comfortably bear.