Germany Didn't Have a Bad Year. It Ran Out of Excuses.

 

Let me say it again, because the first time I wrote it down I didn’t believe it myself.

The Christian Democrats got less than five percent.

Not five percent less than last time. Less than five percent, full stop. The CDU. Adenauer’s party, Kohl’s party, the party that built this country twice over and was the wall you leaned against for seventy years whether you voted for them or not. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania they didn’t just lose. They got erased.

Then I watched the press conference, and that’s what has been sitting in my chest for three days. Not the number itself, and not even the AfD at 28 percent, though God knows that should keep you up at night. It’s that nobody quit. Nobody pushed their chair back. Nobody looked into a camera and said, “We have lost the consent of the people who built this country, and we need to understand why.”

Merz called it “a severe blow” and said the repercussions would be felt for a long time. Then he went back to his desk and back to work on a tax package worth 0.21 percent of GDP.

Put those two numbers side by side and just look at them.

0.21 percent.

In real terms, GDP is basically where it was in 2019. Seven years. And I don’t mean seven quiet years of steady growth, I mean a flatline, a country holding its breath. I have friends in Stuttgart whose fathers worked at the same supplier for thirty years, and whose grandfathers worked there before that. That plant is on short-time now. The chemical park in Ludwigshafen used to light up the whole river at night, and now half its lights are off. The machine-tool people in the Sauerland, the ones every minister loves to name-drop in a Mittelstand speech, are getting undercut by Chinese competitors who deliver in six weeks what takes them sixteen, while they pay three times what an American pays for the same kilowatt hour.

And Berlin’s answer was 0.21 percent.

Last week I talked to a guy who runs a mid-sized foundry. Not a CEO with a driver, a man who still wears steel-toes to work. He told me, “They keep sending us questionnaires about our transformation readiness.” He laughed when he said it. It wasn’t a happy laugh.

Business leaders put out the polite statement in public: “a start.” In private they’re saying something else. Boehringer is pulling nine hundred million out of planned German investment. Not trimming it, not delaying it, canceling it. Zalando is shutting a whole logistics hub. And every week you read a quote from someone who doesn’t want their name used: “We’re demanding change or we’re voting with our feet.”

Voting with our feet. It’s such a clean phrase for such a brutal thing. It means leaving. It means taking what your father built and moving it to Texas, or Katowice, or Tangier, anywhere you don’t need a lawyer, an energy consultant, and four years just to get permission to replace a furnace.

For fifty years the German story was that our way is better. Not louder or flashier, better. More precise, more reliable, more honest. That story is breaking, and not because people think Germany has gotten bad at what it does. It’s because they’re starting to think it doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t afford to keep the lights on.

Which brings me to energy, where all the polite lying happens.

Yes, renewables are more than half of our electricity now. That’s true, it’s remarkable, and the engineers who pulled it off should be proud. I mean that. But electricity isn’t industry. My grandfather could have told you that. The glass in your window, the fertilizer for your wheat, the steel in your car door, none of it runs on a windy Tuesday. It runs on gas and oil. It runs on molecules, not electrons.

And Germany took the cheapest gas in the world, arriving through a pipe, and swapped it for the most expensive gas in the world, arriving on a boat from a handful of sellers who know exactly how tight the noose is. You can’t wind-turbine your way out of that. You can only buy time with money, and you need a government willing to look a chemical company in the eye and say your energy cost is my national security problem.

Instead we got a fight in Brussels over procedure. Not over whether to cut electricity taxes relative to gas, since everyone agrees on that, but over which voting rule to use to do it. The Commission wants a qualified majority. Berlin says no, that would be a power grab and it needs unanimity.

Read that again. While a factory in Bitterfeld is deciding whether to close for good, the argument in the capital is about which paragraph of a treaty to invoke. That isn’t governing. That’s a debating club that forgot there’s a country outside.

Then there’s the army.

I grew up in a Germany that would never again have a general who mattered. That was the promise, and that was the identity. Now we have the first national military strategy since the war. We have a permanent brigade in Lithuania, German kids sleeping in barracks twenty miles from the Russian border, for good. We rewrote the debt brake, the one thing every German politician treated like the Ten Commandments, so we could afford tanks.

It had to happen, and I know that. If you live in Europe you can’t pretend someone else will do it for you forever. But do you understand what a psychological fracture it is to go from “never again” to Europe’s strongest conventional army in three years? There’s no manual for that, and no speech that makes it feel normal.

Warsaw knows it. Vilnius knows it. Tallinn knows it. I spent a day in Warsaw last month, and over pierogi too hot to eat, a former foreign ministry guy said what everyone is thinking and nobody in Berlin will put in print: “We need Germany to be strong. We are terrified of Germany being strong and angry at the same time.” He didn’t mean militarily. He meant politically.

Those same neighbors watch the news. They see 28 percent for a party that wants to leave the EU and lift sanctions on Moscow. They see a German army getting money again and a German electorate saying maybe the West isn’t working for us. Put those together and you get a sentence nobody wants to say out loud: what if German money and German engineering stop being Western?

That’s the fear underneath all of it. Not that Germany is collapsing, but that it’s turning into something else, bigger and less predictable at the same time.

At home, the coalition is exactly what you’d expect from two partners who have run out of shared language.

Merz’s people want to kill Rente mit 63, the rule that lets you retire on a full pension after 45 years of work if you started at 17 or 18. On paper it looks like reform. In Mecklenburg, where people actually live, it sounds like this: you started as a bricklayer at sixteen, you had two years of unemployment after the Wende when the whole east was sold for scrap, your knees are gone at sixty-two, and now some guy from the Sauerland who went to law school tells you the deal you signed was irresponsible.

The SPD calls it heartless. The east hears theft. Both are right, which is why nothing moves.

So every time Merz says “reform,” his partner hears “cuts.” Every time the SPD says “security,” Merz hears “delay.” They aren’t even arguing about the same country anymore. They’re passing memos past each other while the country sits in neutral.

That’s the word I keep coming back to. Not crisis. A crisis would be noisy and would force a choice. This is idling. The trains mostly run on time, the bakery opens at six, the Bundestag has a full agenda, and everything functions. Underneath it all there’s this low, grinding sound of an engine running without oil.

I keep thinking about something a CDU press spokesman said this week: “Changing chancellors is not the answer, because whoever took over would face the same challenges.” He meant it as a defense of Merz. Listen to what it actually says. Our best argument is that nobody can fix this. If that’s where you are, you’re not defending a government, you’re defending an institution’s right to go on existing.

Germany is still rich. It’s still the biggest economy in Europe, and it’s still what holds the EU together. But an anchor doesn’t only hold, it drags, quietly, inch by inch. One morning you wake up and the whole continent is fifty miles from where you thought you’d anchored it, and nobody remembers when it started moving.

People keep asking me whether Merz survives. That’s the wrong question. He might, and probably will for a while, because there’s nobody else and everyone knows it.

The right question is whether anyone in Berlin can tell a story about Germany that a guy in Neubrandenburg or Duisburg or Kaiserslautern recognizes as his own. Right now there are two stories on offer. One says be patient, the treatment takes time, we have a 0.21 percent plan and a procedure we’re fighting over in Brussels. The other says you’ve been abandoned, you were right to be angry, and we’re the only ones who are angry with you.

The second one is winning. Not because it has answers, because it doesn’t. It has no plan for the gas price, none for pensions, none for the army. It’s winning because anger feels like honesty when everything else feels like management.

And that’s the most German tragedy I can think of. A country that spent eighty years learning to manage everything perfectly has forgotten how to talk to its own people. It didn’t have a bad year, it ran out of excuses. And when a country runs out of excuses, it has two choices: find a new story, or find someone to blame.

Right now we’re choosing blame. And we’re doing it with the lights still on, the streets still clean, everything still moving. Just not going anywhere.

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