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Henry Donovan
Germany is quietly falling apart
Monday, July 6, 2026, 10:39 AM
The AfD, which held its conference in Erfurt, eastern Germany, is reaping the political rewards from Germany's decline (Getty images)
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Henry Donovan
Germany is quietly falling apart
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In Germany, the trains have stopped running on time, bridges have been shut over safety fears, and the country’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen, is cutting a sixth of its workforce. The government’s response amounts to a shrug, dressed up as reform. It seems like Germany is on a bad streak – and the AfD looks set to reap the rewards.
Why does a country that still thinks of itself as Europe’s engine room seem to have lost the ability to fix its own bridges?
Take the railways, the infamous Deutsche Bahn. A few weeks ago, they ground to a total halt. Every train in the country stood still, because the radio system that lets drivers talk to signal boxes – a system that appears to date, in spirit if not in silicon, from the Kaiserreich – simply stopped working. For several hours, nothing moved on the tracks of Europe’s largest economy.
Stranded passengers shrugged at reporters when asked how they felt about it. This is just what Deutsche Bahn does, several said, with the weary resignation of people describing the weather rather than a national infrastructure failure. That reaction tells you more about the current German mood than the failure itself does. It is not anger. It is fatalism.
Transport minister, Patrick Schnieder, responded with the platitude every politician reaches for in a crisis: he demanded "comprehensive clarification." It is a mark of quite how unglamorous his brief has become that Schnieder – a man nominally responsible for one of the most consequential portfolios in government – remains almost entirely unknown to the German public. Nobody expects him to fix anything. Nobody, really, expects anyone to.
Consider the rest of the news from the past month. The new Stuttgart railway station, a project that has been under construction for more than two decades, will now open in 2031 – a decade later than originally planned, and that is the optimistic scenario. This barely made headlines, because nobody in Germany still believes Stuttgart 21 will ever actually finish on schedule; they have simply stopped counting.
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Then the Rhine bridge carrying the Autobahn A565 near Bonn – a critical east-west artery through one of the country’s busiest regions – was shut without warning because it was structurally unsound. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the industrial heartland of the Bundesrepublik, one in three motorway bridges is now judged to need repair. True to form, the work is delayed until the danger becomes so acute that bridges are occasionally closed on the very day the inspectors find the fault. The public receives this news with a shrug too.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen, the company whose name is practically synonymous with German industrial identity, is reportedly preparing to cut 100,000 of its 600,000 jobs worldwide, with four domestic factories on the chopping block. The unions and the SPD blame management. They might more usefully blame a decarbonization timetable so aggressive, and a combustion-engine ban so rigid, that it left German carmakers with nowhere to hide when cheaper Chinese electric alternatives arrived. Naturally, nobody in government will admit as much. The correction, when it comes, is grudging and half-hearted.
It is worth dwelling on what all this represents, because it is not merely a bad month. "Vorsprung durch Technik" was not just an Audi slogan; it was the self-image of an entire nation – a country that ran on the twin pillars of relentlessly capable infrastructure and an industrial base that fused engineering excellence with genuine innovation. The Institute for German Economic Research has tracked, for over a decade, how many companies feel held back by crumbling roads and rail. In 2013, 59 percent said yes. Today it is 84 percent, with the share reporting severe disruption rising sharply since 2018. Every delayed train and closed bridge is, in the driest possible sense, a tax on German growth.
Berlin’s answer to all this, delivered with much self-congratulation, was a package of pension and tax reforms that the governing parties have spent the past fortnight applauding themselves for, with the press obligingly joining the chorus. The reforms are overdue; they...