GERMANY, long a synonym for economic muscle, is beginning to recall words like lumbago or sciatica instead.

Though still leading in Europe, and fourth in the world, it faces an economic mess, a political mess and a mood of general stress. Schools lack repairs and teachers, clinics and hospitals lack staff. Its key industry, making good cars, lacks customers. All sliding downhill.

What’s moving up? Apartment rents, grocery prices, the fear of fascists. And oh yes, most speedily, the bank accounts of folks like Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, top man in that happy but exclusive club of armament-makers.

“We are one of the fastest-growing defence enterprises in the world and on the road to becoming global champion,” he boasts, and with good reason: since 2020 his company’s share price has jumped more than 2,000 per cent, thanks to the Ukraine war. Some do prosper!

For the others the economy, with a growth prospect at a low near 0.00 per cent, is best symbolised by the Rhine water level, maybe soon navigable only for flatboats and scows. But Rheinmetall, the river’s namesake, is selling tanks, artillery, shells, anti-aircraft guns and military trucks like hot cakes, while it expands, not just in Germany but in Italy, the US … even in Ukraine.

That last word, with unlimited military spending, are major causes of German troubles. They helped provoke those sudden elections, long before the normal turnover, and may even have played a role in the shock two weeks ago for Friedrich Merz.

Smugly certain of a victory vote as new chancellor in the new Bundestag, he was dumbfounded by a defeat. His election relied on his own “Union” (a sisterhood of two Christian parties, often counted as one) and its new junior partner, the Social Democrats, adding up to a slim but seemingly sure-fire majority.

But then 16 delegates voted against their own man, a first in Bundestag history. The result: turmoil. Since voting was secret we don’t know whether such disobedience was caused by personal grudges, political differences, or both. After hasty rallies and no doubt angry arm-twisting, a second vote was held, everyone behaved and Merz won out. But it was a huge embarrassment for him — and a source of great schadenfreude for all those with no love for this millionaire rightwinger, once top man for BlackRock in Germany, a man full of hauteur if not hatred. And now the new boss.

German politics may seem complicated. True enough, the ballot sheet in the February election was a laundry list of 29 parties. But most of them are what you might call hobby parties, getting less than 1 or 2 per cent. Only five (counting the Christian Union as one) received the 5 per cent needed to get seats in the Bundestag. And three of those, though not identical, are similar triplets.

The Christian Union of Merz, in a weak first place (at 28.6 per cent), needed a partner for a majority. It chose the Social Democrats, longtime rivals and with their puniest result in history (16.4 per cent), thus pushing  the once haughty Greens out of warm cabinet armchairs and onto cold opposition seats.

The new team now faces the slump. The Ukraine war meant finally bowing to US pressure to cut inexpensive Russian fuel imports, piped in overland or under water (until stopped by that not-so-mysterious Baltic explosion, so knowingly predicted by Joe Biden.) Liquefied gas from the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Mexico (now called “Gulf of America” but just as expensive) cost far more and required expensive new port facilities.

The loss of Russian trade, selling it cars, machine tools, vegetables, also hit hard. No-one knows how tough Donald Trump’s tariff shenanigans will end up (Trump probably doesn’t either) but even if reduced they don’t look good for German export industries, always a key to its prosperity. Its lethargy, or hubris, in the world’s changing car market has also hit hard, especially faced by sharp competition from China. German-Ford and VW are shuttering departments, maybe sites — and face strikes, till now unheard of with their hitherto well-paid and content workers.

The new government’s planned solution, by no means new or exclusively German, has several components:

Keep taxes low for the wealthy and their monopolies, even lower than now, allegedly to spur investment especially within Germany.

Cut working people’s rights, incomes and benefits, as usual hitting the poorest most heavily.

Deflect protest by blaming immigrants for causing lengthening waiting times for doctors or dentists, stuffing school benches with kids who can’t speak German, for lazily avoiding work but getting spoiled with public services at Germans’ expense, being rowdy; or being violent  killers or rapists, all dwelt upon lovingly and lyingly by the media.

More and more they agree on the answer to most problems: a drive towards war.

But how can the public be won for this, especially in reluctant, still disadvantaged eastern Germany?

Firstly with emotional appeals to continue the war in the Ukraine until victory — and barely concealed anxiety that Trump, Vladimir Putin and finally Volodymyr Zelensky may reach some agreement after all and achieve peace.

In what seems a co-ordinated campaign, the idea of a big future war is being increasingly accepted by most media and most politicians.

With total disdain for both geography and common sense, they insist that if and when satanic Putin can devour Ukraine he will expand westward, heading straight toward the Brandenburg Gate. That supposed threat, already bursting out of the subjunctive mood, requires ever more and ever more modern weapons, building up the army, navy and air force, maintaining, with or without Trump, the middle-range atomic missile bases in Germany capable of reaching and wrecking Moscow in minutes.

It means strengthening highways, bridges, ports and airlines to carry heavy weapons, registering all Germans if possible, especially those of military age, and reviving the draft. All under the scary heading: “The Russians are coming!” For people with an ear or nose for history, the sound and smell of 1912-1914 and of the 1930s is reaching penetrating levels.

I found a symbol of this with a company I once worked for briefly. In beautiful, picturesque Gorlitz at the Polish border, the town’s main enterprise, founded in 1849, was a top-rank manufacturer of double-decker coaches, sleeping cars and other specialised railroad cars.

Nationalised in German Democratic Republic days, with 5-6,000 employees, it had a library, a big outpatient clinic, a “house of culture.”

Privatised after German “unification” in 1990, it was bought, sold, bought, cut and cut and cut again, with all those amenities long since shut down and the town emptying out.

Now at last it and Gorlitz have new hope: making Leopard tanks, Puma tanks, Boxer tanks. Some 400-500 workers will have work. Olaf Scholz, in one of his last days in office, was happy: “It is very good news that industrial jobs will be saved in Gorlitz.”

And the highway heading east through Poland will be enlarged to carry weightier loads. So may be the pockets and the accounts of men like Armin Papperger with his Rheinmetall or, in Gorlitz, its “comrade in arms” Krauss-Maffei-Wegmann (now KMDS), also with over a century of experience in tanks and the like.

Merz and his Christians are loudest. But all those with any power go along, including the Greens, who are no longer in power. Of course, they all want only to preserve  freedom, democracy and the safe existence of “our Germany.”

Rearming costs billions. Barely hours before being replaced by the new Bundestag, the old one altered the constitution to dump the national debt ceiling und permit unlimited military purchases. The sky’s the limit! A previous, seemingly impossible goal of 2 per cent of gross total product for arms can now soar to 3.5 per cent and, if Trump has his way, to 5 per cent for “self-defence against authoritarians.” That could mean €225 billion, almost half the total budget.

Where would all that money come from? Where else than from the pockets of the children, the sick, the jobless, the underpaid?

“Work harder, more efficiently” — and longer! Get rid of the 40-hour work week, delay the pension age, pay more into the medical care system, get less support if you lose your job, submit to even the worst low-wage substitute job!

There are so many ways to skin a cat — or working people.

And who’s to blame for all this? Most likely those illegal immigrants! Or maybe Putin again. Or “the disdain of authoritarian leaders for our democratic system.” Which we might detect too in Berlin, in Kiev, Riyadh — or Israeli-occupied Palestine.

This article continues tomorrow, with the second part focusing on what opposition forces exist in Germany.