Merkel era was "incompetence"/inaction, Merz is pure malice. Remember when he did the McDonalds ad during his campaign and then the first thing after being elected was the gastronomy tax reduction which heavily favored, you guessed it, McDonalds? Sorry, wasn't actually the first thing. The first thing was breaking his campaign promise of honoring Schuldenbremse, after using the Schuldenbremse to explode the former government. He then took future Germany's money to pay his fastfood bros. If that's not malice, what is? Well, I would actually call it treason. And let's not start with Reiche and Spahn talking malice.

I would also reject the notion China "happened" to Germany, or energy costs were rising due to moral panics regarding nuclear power.

Germany once was leader in renewable energy tech, both solar and wind. Corruption and lobby driven politics intentionally abandoned that edge and caused an inefficient energy market, which is a main factor in energy costs. Of course our exceptionally productive and capable Mittelstand is not considered "German industry", only a few old-money corporations are. Your are saying the decline happened over 30 years, but the last nuclear power plat was only shut down 2023. And Germany's naive dependence on Russian gas was one of the main causal factors for the Ukraine war and all the expenses it caused. There absolutely was a cheaper, sustainable path intentionally not taken.

The same is true for our industry. It's corruption/lobbyism, arrogance and inaction, in face of slowly emerging Chinese "competition", which caused the downfall. It's not like politics/industry tried their best and failed. They tried nothing. On the contrary, they enforced the status quo over innovation and now when their power play failed they got nothing to offer. The reason BMW isn't the leader in electric cars is because at some point management decided to scrape the successful program, because "muh ICE so technology!". VW never even tried, but rather went all-in on lobbying to future-proof their business. Let's raise taxes for the bail-out.

And then of course the establishment owned media helped too, preventing necessary adaptations: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...

Corruption, arrogance and inaction caused the German downfall.