[Skybird]

Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
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Germany is like its football: complacent and comfortable

2022 is a bankrupt year for the Federal Republic: high energy prices, a failed Russia policy, and now Qatar's exit. Once again, the country has hit rock bottom. But Germany has a trump card.

The German national team's disgraceful performance in Qatar serves as a parable for the state of the country. Typically, politics and soccer in Germany go through three phases:

Phase 1: First, the Federal Republic is strong, its economy dominates world markets. It is the world champion, whether in exports or in soccer. Then the country becomes complacent.
Phase 2: At the latest, when the country celebrates itself as "Model Germany," it is obvious: Things are going downhill. Efforts slacken, the descent begins.
Phase 3: At some point, the pressure of suffering becomes so high that Germany recalls its qualities. It then consistently tackles the problems and solves them with a thoroughness that sometimes makes you dizzy. Then comes the resurgence and with it a new round in the eternal pig cycle.

This is how it was in the 1990s, when Germany fell into a state of shock after reunification. The country was soon regarded as the sick man of Europe and ended up in one of the last places in the EU in economic comparison. The national team, too, was mainly a failure after winning the World Cup in 1990. Germany, pretty far down.

Representing the forward-looking part of the nation, German President Roman Herzog demanded that a jolt go through Germany. The German Football Association improved youth development and training methods. Jürgen Klinsmann played modern soccer and finally enchanted Germany with the summer fairy tale.

Gerhard Schröder tackled what his predecessor Helmut Kohl had lacked the strength to do. He gave the country a complete overhaul. His social reforms played their part in the rapid economic recovery. An achievement - by a Social Democrat, of all people - as improbable as the 7:1 victory over Brazil in Belo Horizonte.

Too many foreigners receive social welfare

To this day, Germany still thrives on the courage of a chancellor who accepted his party's crisis and an electoral defeat. Schröder still deserves a monument for this, even if he would be the first to tear it down with his behavior.

Since then, however, the country has done little to maintain or even increase its competitiveness. Like the 2014 soccer world champion, it is resting on its laurels. Angela Merkel did not use the sixteen years to build on Schröder's foundation. Instead, each group received a little subsidy: Retired women, young parents, drivers, builders and hoteliers.

Merkel became the Jogi Löw of German politics. She was glued to the coach's bench in an endless stoppage time. The final whistle was a salvation. Her team, the CDU, was relegated. It is still far from advancing to the government league in terms of content and personnel.

The German Football Association appointed Hansi Flick, Löw's former assistant, as national coach. Let there be no change, no breath of fresh air and no unconventional ideas.

The German voters were wiser and sent a new team onto the pitch a year ago. However, the new team quickly fell into the same old rut. In the economic and social spheres, it has only one reform to show for itself after one year. The citizen's income also serves to deal with the SPD's Hartz trauma. Additional costs of five billion euros are quite a lot of money for social democratic Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

At the same time, the reform does not take care of the elephant in the room of the welfare state: 40 percent of welfare recipients are migrants. In 2010, their share was still 20 percent. Ukraine refugees are not included in this figure.

All governments since the end of the Kohl era have tried to reduce the share of welfare state immigrants and increase the number of qualified migrants. The opposite has happened. In Germany, asylum seekers receive extensive benefits at an early stage compared to other European countries, even though a high percentage of them have no prospect of recognition.

The state keeps expanding

The welfare state is having a hard time with change. "Reforms," as in Merkel's day, are mainly limited to pumping more money into the system.

Genuine structural reforms like Schröder's Agenda 2010 are as absent as regulatory reforms. In the noughties, there was a spirit of optimism, and the state changed under the influence of the zeitgeist.

Some things succeeded permanently, such as the major reform of corporate taxation, which led to the dissolution of the "Deutschland AG. Some things remained piecemeal, such as the federalism reform and the reform of old-age security; and some things have been successively watered down since then, including Agenda 2010.

Instead of dynamism, comfort and stagnation now prevail. People are satisfied with the average. It's like in soccer. At the 2021 European Championship, Germany was eliminated in the round of 16. A warning shot, but the jolt failed to materialize. The receipt is painful. After Russia 2018, the team was knocked out in the preliminary round of a World Cup in Qatar for the second time in a row. There has been nothing like this in the last sixty years.

Not much is moving in politics either. The tax system is still one of the most complicated in the world. The inflexible labor laws make it seem more attractive in many cases to hire an employee in Switzerland than in Germany.

The reduction of subsidies, a favorite topic in Sunday speeches a few years ago, has not only come to a standstill. With pandemic aid and all the programs to make energy cheaper, the trend is rapidly moving in the opposite direction.

Less government and more freedom for private initiative? That's as out of the question as the last time Thomas Müller scored in the national jersey. On the contrary, in the pandemic, the chancellor and prime ministers imposed restrictions on freedom of a kind that previously would have been associated only with dictatorships.

Politicians and journalists patted each other on the back for initially managing the pandemic better than Italy and France. Model Germany. In the end, however, the mortality rate was not lower than in Switzerland, but at a much higher cost and with considerably more restrictions.

At the same time, politics spread an image of man that sees the citizen only as a source of danger: as a virus smuggler, and soon as a CO2 emitter. It does not take much imagination to imagine that the instruments created in the pandemic will one day be used to force citizens to behave in a climate-friendly manner.

Structural reforms are more urgent than ever

The traffic light coalition claims to be fully occupied with mitigating the consequences of the energy crisis and inflation. That is true, but the means used to do so are making the problems worse.

The government is reaching for the watering can to relieve the citizens. Once again, a lot of money is supposed to fix the unwillingness to make structural improvements.

There is no idea how the world's leading exporter can increase its competitiveness at a time when its strongest sector, the automotive industry, is coming under pressure from the regulation-hungry EU and Asian manufacturers of electric vehicles.

Germany is also being hit harder economically by the Ukraine war than other Western European countries. That's the price of its Faustian pact with Putin. Energy-intensive companies are toying with the idea of leaving Germany. Or they are foregoing investments and prefer to build new production sites abroad. BASF is building a huge chemical plant in China. At the same time, its CEO Martin Brudermüller announced that it would reduce its activities in Europe as quickly as possible and permanently. This is likely to have the greatest impact on the company's headquarters in Ludwigshafen.

Structural reforms would be all the more important to secure the company's position in Europe and the world. This is a difficult task. So for the time being, people prefer to bury their heads in the sand. At the moment, Germany is really playing the kind of football that suits its politics.

But the pressure of suffering is growing, and Germany has a strong capacity for self-criticism. That's why reforms will be tackled at some point. In soccer, this point seems to have been reached; after all, Oliver Bierhoff had to resign.

In politics, it will probably be a while before things start to look up again. Then the next round of the pig cycle will begin there, too.
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I believe it when I see it. Too many things are different this time.