Germany does not look even remotely prepared to roll back the green delirium it has so enthusiastically shackled itself to—though, granted, an election a few years off can still crack open a surprise or two. But even if Berlin suddenly snapped out of its trance and acknowledged the climate circus for what it has become, even if it abandoned every self-inflicted constraint currently strangling the economy, even if—by some cosmic accident—it started doing everything correctly from this exact moment onward (and let’s be honest, the odds hover somewhere between “zero” and “absolutely zero”)… even then, the country would still have to drag itself through a long, bleak valley of tears before daylight dared to reappear.
Because the truth is painfully simple: Germany would have to rebuild a significant portion of its industrial backbone, the very machinery it once wielded like a superpower. And that sort of resurrection isn’t done in a year, or two, or even five. It’s the kind of nation-scale reconstruction that devours political careers long before bearing fruit.
Which leads to the uncomfortable political arithmetic: even if a future government pulled every lever at once—reversed course, deregulated, rebuilt, reindustrialized—there’s little chance they’d ever see the electoral payoff. The suffering comes first, the payoff comes later, and no politician likes the kind of later that extends beyond their term limits.So yes, prepare for misery. Not because it’s inevitable in principle, but because Germany has engineered a perfect storm where even the best-case scenario demands a pilgrimage through hardship before anything resembling recovery can take shape.