Germany's Crisis Is a Very Good Thing
The SPD’s new leadership may stop cooperating with Angela Merkel. The outcome could be surprisingly positive for Europe.
Colorless but useful.
Photographer: AXEL SCHMIDT/AFPNorbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken, the new leaders of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD), may be about to do Germany and Europe a favor. That’s not thanks to any inherent qualities they possess; both are colorless and unimaginative left-wingers vaguely resembling Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, though not quite as reckless. Rather it’s because they may want to take their party out of its coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc, a possibility that has sparked a full-blown government crisis. Anything that shakes the country out of its torpor offers a ray of hope.
The current government of the European Union’s largest economy has been inexcusably mediocre, and is badly in need of change. Name almost any major challenge facing Europe today, and German flexibility and leadership is as needed as it is absent.