No longer clueless

Yet why do so many Germans seem determined to see their new government fail?

In the old GDR there was an area in the far southeast of the country, around Dresden, that, because of topography, couldn’t receive West German TV. It was dubbed the valley of the clueless. Three and a half decades on from reunification, that problem has long been solved (though don’t get me started on internet speeds and digitalisation more generally). Yet I’m not sure access to information has made Germans any more optimistic. Call it (the whole country): the valley of the downbeat.

Even before the new government of Friedrich Merz has been formed, many seem to be wishing it to fail. ‘I told you it wouldn’t end well,’ is a often-used exclamation to respond to anything that goes wrong. Given how important it is for Germany to step up in the face of the twin threats of Trump and Putin, it’s also self-indulgent.

Therefore, whenever I write anything or post anything positive about this country I prepare myself for the inevitable harrumphing from the small but vocal band of British German-bashers (yes, sadly they’re still around) and the incredulity of German self-flagellators.

Two pieces for your consideration, therefore. Below and linked also here for the Guardian, and here, in German, for Der Spiegel, which was entitled Germany Is Back. They are, I contend, not starry-eyed, but hard-headed and realistic. And not glum.

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Few people outside Berlin’s political bubble will have heard of Lars Klingbeil. They will soon, though, as he is about to become one of the pivotal players in the new German government. The co-leader of the Social Democratic party (SPD) captured the moment in this week’s debate in the Bundestag, one of the most important in Germany’s recent history.

“A few weeks ago, many would have thought that we couldn’t have come to an agreement. The differences were too great,” he said. “What differentiates this country from others is that we are ready, as parties of the democratic centre, to find solutions and not to leave the ground for populist extremism to blossom.”

Donald Trump has made this happen. After four years of drift under the hapless Olaf Scholz, Germany has woken from its torpor. By voting for a €500bn infrastructure and environmental injection, and for a whatever-it-takes increase in defence spending, it has shed two shibboleths in one day. It is no longer the country of austerity ad absurdum and it is no longer the country that sub-contracts its defence to a superpower it thought was a friend and now fears may be an adversary.

There are many frustrations, paradoxes and anxieties arising from the dramatic events. The man who will shortly be chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has spent most of his political career opposing borrowing. The debt brake, which hugely restricted public investment in the name of “sound” fiscal rules, was an article of faith for him, his predecessor, Angela Merkel, for their conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and even for the SPD.

Then came the assault on Germany and the west at the Munich security conference by Trump’s lieutenants, a week before Germans went to the polls. As John Maynard Keynes is said to have asked: “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” Merz’s response is to admit that, yes, he has performed the ultimate U-turn, but in a good cause – so that Germany can modernise its economy and play its part in the reinforcement of Europe in the face of the twin threats of Trump and Vladimir Putin.

The Greens have every reason to feel aggrieved. For years they ardently called for more military aid to Ukraine and more spending on environmental and other essential causes. Throughout this time, they were denounced by the conservatives as being spendthrift and by the left as being trigger happy. As a result, they lost votes and have been sent into opposition. They have been brought back in from the cold briefly by Merz, who needed their votes to secure the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution in order to circumvent the debt brake. Even though they felt used, they did the decent thing.

That was not Merz’s only sleight of hand. He needed to ensure that the measure was put to the outgoing parliament, rather than an incoming one where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and leftwing Die Linke would have been able to block the change. It has been ugly to watch. And unprincipled. Or rather, Merz has shown a lack of principle in order to bring into being reforms that are not only principled but vital.

No matter how determined Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, have been, no matter how much they have coordinated their efforts, any European security strategy would have little credibility without Germany. And Germany would have little credibility unless it turned around its decades-old reluctance to arm itself properly and be prepared to use hard power for good ends.

This has now happened. Germany is set on a new course. A political culture that is often regarded as dour and incremental knows, on occasion, how to do drama. In 1999, led by the Greens’ foreign minister Joschka Fischer, the Bundestag voted to take part in military action for the first time since the second world war to defend Kosovo. In 2015, Merkel took the controversial decision to allow in more than a million refugees, from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. In 2022, Scholz responded to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with his Zeitenwende speech and a special €100bn fund for military spending. It felt defining at the time, but the now outgoing chancellor spent the rest of his tenure looking over his shoulder. That moment, as it now transpires, was just the overture.

Germany is a land I have long praised for the deliberative, serious nature of its politics, for its durable constitution and its mature process of building and testing coalitions in the regions and at national level. It has not indulged in the type of clownism that afflicted the UK in the Boris Johnson era. It takes its responsibilities earnestly. Yet it has also been hamstrung by an excess of caution, a lack of self-confidence and also – when it comes to issues of peril – a complacent assumption that others will come to its aid. Thanks to Trump, that is no longer the case and most Germans know it.

They are about to embark on a bumpy ride, with the CDU at the helm and a chastened SPD alongside. Two different parties are coming together to produce a tough and durable coalition in order to keep the populists at bay. Unpredictable and confrontational, Merz is impatient to get things done. Alongside him will be Klingbeil and Boris Pistorius (who may keep his defence portfolio) representing a wing of the SPD shorn of its naivety towards Russia. That is what Germany, Europe and the wider west need in their darkest hour.