Germany, the giant's debacle

With Russia's war against Ukraine, the cost of bringing gas to Germany has risen, and the country has been in economic stagnation for three years.

Pablo Hiriart

https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/opinion/pablo-hiriart/2025/02/25/alemania-la-debacle-del-gigante/

February 25, 2025

Munich. - In Germany, the far right and the far left (anti-liberal, anti-immigration, anti-Ukraine, anti-eurozone) have the support of 25 percent of the electorate. Watch out for that, it is not just the intervention of Musk or Trump, but it is the expression of a deep malaise that will continue to grow.

Something is wrong with the world capital of order and efficiency. It is no longer so.

Let's start with the anecdotal. When I left the hotel, I crossed the street at the corner, with the traffic light on for pedestrians: a man on a bicycle ran the stop sign and almost ran me over. I complained and received some unkind shouts in response, and no one turned to look.

The streets were dirty with dust, paper, cups, cigarette butts, and some plastic bottles lying around. The night was falling (early, no later than seven), and 15 or 20 meters away there were little groups of people taking drugs, vagrants, and lost people with their pants halfway down and some with bottles of liquor in their hands.

I was looking for a store where I could buy some fruit and Coca-Cola to take back to my room and write, but the few that were there closed early, and instead there were plenty of table dance halls (two or three per block), some of them open 24 hours, gambling houses that from the outside look like dark dives. The cell phone (Waze) worked intermittently.

A patrol car passed by without anyone bothering to stop taking drugs. A bad neighborhood, close to the station, but that exists almost everywhere. No way.

On Saturday I took a train to Salzburg, Austria, two hours from Munich, and on the way back there was a problem: a change of platform, a delay, and the announcement that the train coming from Germany had a breakdown. They put us on a couple of cars, packed to the rafters, and took us to the German side, to wait for a train to Munich.

It took almost an hour to get there. Once inside, after 10 or 15 minutes they changed us again. We had to wait for another train to arrive, with a freezing wind coming down from the Alps, in the open air, for another hour, while they fitted some kind of poles with the cables.

From there we came –most of us– standing because there were not enough seats in the carriages. The toilets were filthy. A bad day can happen even in Bavaria, I thought.

On Monday I had plane tickets to travel to Cologne, and when I got to the Lufthansa counter, I found out it was cancelled. I understand it happens sometimes. “What time is the flight?” I asked. “Today nothing, and tomorrow I couldn’t tell you” was the answer. I understood that in Cologne there was a strike at a company providing services to the airport. There was no refund of the ticket price, nor coupons to use on another occasion.

I read a book by the journalist Wolfgang Munchau: Kaput. The end of the German miracle, and I share with you some paragraphs about the debacle of the champions of the analog era, losers in the digital era:

The German SAP “continues to be a software giant (but) it is the only one from Germany among the 50 most important technology companies in the world.”

In 2003, “of the top 20 banks in the world, four were German if measured by asset value, and one – Deutsche Bank – if measured by market capitalization. In November 2023, Deutsche Bank is ranked 729th in the world ranking, while Commerzbank was ranked 1,132nd.”

Aware of its lag, “in 2019 the German government decided to invest 5.5 billion euros in computers for schools. A complicated procedure thwarted the project. The main problem was that schools did not have an internet connection and most of the money was spent on wiring and connecting them. This was the case in 2019 and 2020.”

In 2020, “only 33 percent of German students had access to a digital learning platform, while the OECD average was 54 percent.”

German schools used to be among the best in Europe in the OECD's PISA studies, especially in mathematics and science. The latest PISA test puts Germany in a poor 25th place, behind 13 countries in the European Union.

In 2021, “seven out of ten German households were still connected to copper cables, which offer irritatingly slow internet connection speeds.”

The most recent data shows that fiber optic connections only account for 10 percent of all internet connections in Germany, while France has 51.4 percent and Spain a staggering 81.2 percent.”

The prestigious author says that his favorite story, for its illustration, is from an acquaintance of his in the wooded hills southeast of Dortmund:

“A photographer needed to send a collection of photos to a printing company 10 kilometers away. The total data volume was 5.4 GB. He raced between the internet connection and his horse. He burned his photos onto a DVD and gave his computer 20 minutes while he saddled the animal. The horse not only won the race, but after returning home and feeding it, the photographer discovered that the internet transmission had not yet ended”.

Germany has become increasingly dependent on China, while China has followed the opposite trend. The drastic change was noticeable in 2022:

“Exports rose by only three percent, and imports increased by 34 percent… In total, there are now 36 product groups in which the Chinese share is 80 percent and more than 86 product groups in which the share is above 70 percent.”

For example: “Today Germany depends on China for 80 percent of laptops, and 70 percent of cell phones are imported from China, and 87 percent of photovoltaic systems and solar cells come from there.”

And cars? The boss of bosses is no longer Germany: “The Asian giant has overtaken Germany and Japan as the world's largest exporter of cars.”

Due to political pacts with the Green Party, German governments abandoned nuclear energy, which is clean, and were world leaders. Thus, Germany became (2019) completely dependent on Russian gas imports.

With Russia's war against Ukraine, the cost of bringing gas to Germany rose, the country has been in economic stagnation for three years, and buying Trump's ticket to a trade war against China would make things worse.

They blame migration, but it's a false mantra.