Bye. Bookstack with Richard Aldous, the Books and Ideas podcast brought to you by Persuasion. Coming up on the show today, Wolfgang Wunschau, author of the new book, Kaput. The End of the German Miracle. Wolfgang, welcome to Bookstack. Thank you very much for inviting me. Congratulations on the book. So why is Germany kaput?
Germany is kaputt because it hasn't changed its economic model from the times when it was successful to a period where it would have needed to be changed because the world around us has changed. But Germany stuck to something that was successful. And, you know, many people think it seems like a conservative thing to do, do something that works and don't mess with something that works. But over time, it failed. It no longer worked so well.
And we're living in particular in a time right now, fast technological change, geopolitical change of massive proportions. All of this coming together and the Germans are still making the diesel engine. that we are we're in a and you know and they're using the hacks machine to communicate with one another so a number of things which you know five years ago or ten years ago strikers are slightly odd and 20 years ago strikers are very normal
are completely out of place now. And Germany is very good at certain things, but it's not very good at change, at organic change and at letting change happen. And that is in a very, in a nutshell. Yeah. And you make the point early on in the book that in some ways this is surprising because Germany was the, what I think you describe as the world champion of the analog era. But in the...
digital era, it's contributed very little and that's right at the heart of the problem. Exactly. I mean, the, you know, the journey I grew up in was very techie. I think if you grew up in Germany in the 60s and 70s, you would have family members discussing. very odd technical issues. It was very much an engineering culture. People were interested in engineering things. Whereas... You know, the digital age was always difficult for them because they did not invent.
The Germans invented a lot of things. They invented the car. They kind of owned chemistry, basically. It was quite, until not too long ago, most of the textbooks in chemistry were in Germany. That is obviously no longer the case, but that was the case. So we had... you know, a very sort of Germany-focused, you know, engineering world, tax sector. But the technology behind the digital age is quantum.
physics. And that was something that was invented in Germany. It was invented by Jewish scientists who who actually left Germany before Hitler came to power in the early years of his rise to power. They were not murdered mostly because they were able to leave early and got out and many of them...
ended up in the United States and worked on the Manhattan Project. But it was that technology that gave rise to the transistor, the integrated circuit, all the stuff that eventually led to the semiconductor and AI. got behind. And it was sort of a cultural malaise set in here, because the Germans are not generally Luddites. That's generally not true.
But the digital technology was something because they didn't understand it. It wasn't intuitive for them. It also required different skills. You know, the person who is a good engineer is not necessarily the same person who is a good software engineer. uh you know there's a lot more there's a difference between maths and engineering different you know it you know you would think they're all the same if you're not you know if you're sort of a liberal arts person but they are very different
You know, the maths people are much more sort of rigorous and much more sort of abstract, whereas the, you know, engineers are, you know, in the what works, works, you know, part of the world. And that was for the Germans. And the modern world of AI is very abstract. and requires also some abilities which are also not very strong in Germany, which is this out-of-the-box, non-consensual thinking. And here, I think this is a very important part of this story, is consensus thinking, groupthink.
That was in Germany because the German system was based very much around a number of companies. The government, the companies, the financial sector, they all work together. research institutes and they channeled and they invented things like the diesel engine was the result of this kind of collaboration.
But it was certainly not a whistleblower society. It's certainly not a society of people who say, okay, I disagree with this. I'm going to set up my own company and I'll do a Tesla thing. VW had actually people. inside who wanted to build the electric car. They had good people and these people were pushed aside.
Yeah, I mean, you say that Germany's not traditionally a Luddite society, but at the same time in the book, you do say that there is what you describe as a Smith-Corona typewriter problem, that there is this kind of attachment to old... often obsolete technology. And these are things that you see in everyday life as well. The attachment to cash, for example, the lack of a 5G network and so on. Oh, indeed. And I remember an example from my own.
you know, my own little history. When I was a newspaper editor in Germany, we had just launched a new newspaper on the German market in the early 2000s. And we hadn't even launched. We were, you know, when you launch a newspaper... dummy phase where you work but nothing nothing gets published and in that phase we had a discussion about whether we should change this one small small thing we did and
A colleague said, no, but we can't change this because we always used to do this. And I said, we haven't even launched. There's no such thing that we always used to do this. But it's interesting how this thinking.
you know this sort of luddite thinking what you call the smith's corona problem which i've described extensively in the book and i think the smith's corona problem is in many ways how such a problem can arise and the smith's corona problem is interesting because smith's corona didn't just disappear when the pc came it actually did extremely well when the pc came
because it integrated digital technologies into the typewriters. I don't know whether you remember, but the old-style typewriters had little windows with little screens. I think possibly that was my first typewriter. Yeah, it might have been. And Smith Cabrona wasn't... away by the pce smith corona was blown away by the laser
And so when the laser printer came and that solved the typewriter problem for computer users, because the early part of the computer, we couldn't, you know, it wouldn't replace, because it wasn't nice that the kind of printers we had, these horrible printers.
they were they were just not very good and you couldn't the typewriter was nice and and and that was always the case especially of companies who when they wrote you know good letters this was before email you know they wanted they needed they needed proper printer and the laser printer produced that and obviously the laser printer was then killed by email and things moved down the food chain but it's
is a good example. And that's obviously the same with the electric car and the old analog car. They're actually not the same product. And I think the mistake people make is that they both call them car. The new electric car. is at its heart a digital device at the center of it is an ipad style thing and around it is a lot of technology but the heart and actually this is when you think about it commercially
At the heart, it's a software product. It's AI, data, self-driving car. This is where all the high-tech is in this car. The high-tech is not in the braking system. engine and the wheels this is not where it is and for example if you have fog um and uh in general motorway and there's sort of an accident ahead of you and you don't see it Now, with the current technology, you would hope you have very, very good brakes and a very fast reaction in order to prevent driving into a scene of an accident.
In an AI world, you can have very average brakes, very bad brakes, as long as your car gets the data from the accident scene before you can actually see the accident scene and the car has enough time to slow down. It doesn't even need a break. It can just slow down very gently and get to a zero point just before. And that's the kind of thing that AI will do. It lowers the requirement for mechanics. And if you look at our mobile phones,
There's a computer once. There was actually a phone once. There's a camera. There's a compass. I mean, if you look at the number of... analog devices that used you know that would make up what the mobile phone does today and that's what's happening to the car industry and so it's happening to the entire mechanical
We still need mechanical industry. I'm not saying this will all go away. Heavy earth-moving equipment, you know, this will never be done purely digitally or, you know, sending a rocket into space, you know, you need propulsion and stuff that actually moves. But, you know, that's where the Americans are actually very good at. The German end of the technology is the one that's under threat because this is now subject to digitalization.
And it is also in the other stuff that isn't subject to digitalization, which is purely mechanical, is subject to competition from China. And that's how they get squeezed right now. And I mean, it's interesting because a lot of it would be easy to mistake a lot of what you've just described there as being not being nimble enough in the marketplace to transition to changes. But actually, the major thrust.
of the book, it seems to me, is that a lot of these problems for Germany are structural. And in particular, you identify the relationship between banks, private industry and government. kind of neo-mechanalism, which is at the heart of the German system. Tell us a bit about that and why you believe that that's had such a bad effect on not just the German economy, but German society.
I mean, this system that I call neo-recantialism, you know, we have to say it worked really well for a very, very long time. It was a good system. For an industrial society, quite well made because industry is quite different from services companies. It needs longer term planning horizons. So it had a banking system that would support this. It had a research network. of the so-called Max Planck Institutes and Fraunhofer Institutes. This is extensive semi-state-owned or state-owned institutions.
And the universities and the companies would work together. They had separate institutions. So the whole system was like, you know, wonderfully tuned for a very static industrial structure.
And I think the banking is the first chapter of the book. People ask me, why did you start with the banks? Because that's not where people would normally think you start. But I think this is the most important thing. As a journalist, as a financial journalist, I know you follow the money. That's the most important advice I've ever given to a financial journalist.
And that is exactly what you need to do, is the Sparkassen, the Landesbank, those state-owned institutions that have very steady relationship with the companies. Now, it's easy to give a loan to Volkswagen because Volkswagen has a lot of assets. can give a loan to Volkswagen. Now, a bank, it's a business model. It cannot create a Google or a Meta or an Amazon.
That requires a very different funding model. You can't complain. You can't blame the banks for not doing this. And this is something where we have to... This is the essential point. Germany needed, in order to move away from a system like this, requires a different funding model for the capital market. like what you have in the UK. The UK is much better at this, actually. It's not a great economy at the moment. It has other problems.
But at least the UK isn't just, you know, it isn't just depending on the same companies doing the same thing. If there are new companies, the UK doesn't systemically frustrate it because it does have a capital market that allows. that allows this to happen. And that's why I think, you know, it's very, very important to open up this banking sector because... There isn't the intelligence that you need to create the new industrial sector. This is not in the banking sector.
You remember the film, The Big Short, on the global financial crisis. Now, they talked about the stupid Disseldorf bankers, and that was one of these Landesbankers writing about it. They didn't know these sophisticated or fraudulent, as it turned out, financial products. They couldn't see through this because generally the country is not financially very educated.
And that is a problem with societies that are heavily dependent on stable banking relationships. And this, again, an example of something that was a strength. But if you want to move away from your industrials, you know, over...
reliance to something else you need a more flexible banking sector and i think dependence is the problem you know depends on russia for gas depends on china for exports now depends on the united states for exports and also for defense germany built up so many dependencies
and dependencies you know to make you static and when you want to move away from them as you know currently we probably on the current political environment it's probably a good idea to become a little bit less dependent on the united states That's difficult because you're stuck where you are and you don't have the infrastructure to become more independent. And that is the problem with this, especially for industry.
And I mean, it is interesting on the banks. I mean, you give you give examples of how profound those links between government and banking, how strong they are. But the one that really stood out to me was that the Deutsche Bank report. that you cite written in 2021 that excoriated the structure of the banking sector in terms that you would probably agree with. But rather than embracing that change, the bank's own president apologized for it.
The report was rescinded. I don't know what happened to the team that wrote the report. But that's the problem right there, that bankers are essentially creatures of the state, it seems to me. Absolutely. And the same goes for industrialists. They are part of the same institution. As I said, it's not a whistleblower. That was essentially a whistleblower act. It was basically saying, guys saying, this isn't working. And, you know, the banking sector carries risk.
If you have an industrial crisis and you have a banking sector that's tied to industry, now, you know, this will eventually become a financial crisis. You know, this is not, it won't start as a financial crisis. but it will end up as a financial crisis. If you get a large industrial bankruptcy, which should be allowed to happen, but it probably will be prevented because of a contagion effect.
government would say, oh my God, if this large company, I don't want to put any even hypothetical names into this. If this large company goes bust, then this bank would go bust. And if this bank goes bust, then this other bank goes bust. And then this company goes bust. And then you have a fire. And that is the thinking. And that's what prevents change.
Money will be poured in the old sectors. And this is what the outgoing government did. It put money... into the car industry into into saving the supply chains of the old car industry so that's why we had all these battery ventures all these semiconductor ventures it was all about cars they wanted to ensure that the cars get their stuff from and they don't need to rely on China
And all these ventures, by the way, failed. All the battery ventures failed. All the semiconductor ventures failed. It's been a complete, utter disaster. And that money should have been used to say, okay, let's not subsidize the old industry. Let's make life a little easier for young companies, exempt them from the tax or something for a couple of years and then you'll see how they grow.
You talked about dependencies there. And I think it's important for listeners to realise that this book is as much a history as it is about contemporary politics. You go back to, for example, looking at Chancellor Schmitt. and so on. Two of those major dependencies do go back to somebody like Schmidt, China, for example, where he developed this realist view of the world that you just have to accept it as it was.
trade with China, but very quickly this becomes a kind of turbocharged neo-mechanalism with Germany dependent on China, similarly on Russia. People looked back to the 19th century and said, you know, can we not revive the relations that the two countries had, Russia and Germany, in the 19th century. But again, it becomes a dependency over gas. On both of those issues, you describe this as being unbelievably nice.
on the part of German policymakers. Yeah, absolutely. As much as Germany is sophisticated when it comes to the technologies in Masters, it's very unsophisticated. in respect of geopolitics. And companies have basically assumed that the government shields them from geopolitics. They have a very generous export guarantee, export credit guarantee.
shields them from risks. The government takes them on the plane, on government planes, fly them into China and they sign contracts. So the government kind of fixes the politics and inside this sort of bubble, this sort of bubble of...
presumed safety, they think they're protected. And there was this one scene I described from BASF, which is a company that radically... expanded to china and where a member of the board not a german one and foreigner said look i mean i think you're exposing yourself too much there's a risk in china you know everybody else in the world thinks china is risky whereas you think it's just you know zero risk
You know, that member had to leave the government. Whether directly in association with this particular issue or for other reasons, we're not able to establish this. But, you know, it's again a situation when you question the consensus. they don't take kindly to this. It's not something that everybody agreed with. And this is why the entire German car industry did not invest in electric cars.
It was a cultural thing because, you know, once they decided as a society, that's not what they do. That's what they didn't. And the people who did then got booted out of guidelines. That's the unfortunate thing. Yeah, and it is very striking in the book that politically there is a consensus. It doesn't matter whether it's parties from the left or parties from the right, kind of seem to be wedded to this idea of Germany as an industrial society.
that society needs energy it needs markets so let's get gas from Russia let's sell BMWs to China to hell with the consequences you do there are particular individuals who come out very badly from the book Gerhard Schroeder gets a good kicking in the book. But perhaps Angela Merkel is the personification of all of this. I can't think of an example of someone whose historical reputation has plummeted so fast.
so far after leaving office. I mean, the new consensus is that on virtually everything, she got the calls wrong. Where do you stand on that? Yeah, I mean, I criticised her heavily in my newspaper columns for a very, very long time. People thought I had some personal issue with her, but I don't. She was actually a very, very nice person.
I met her on a couple of occasions and she was very, you know, there's nothing wrong with her, you know, with her personality or she was a talented politician, a very gifted, very intelligent person as well. She made bad calls because she prioritized her own survival, and she pursued this ruthlessly. For example, on the famous call to end nuclear power.
or to bring the closure. The end had already been decided, but she brought the date forward. That was purely, you know, it was an impromptu decision, something, you know, the Fukushima nuclear accident happened. Then she decided to do this immediately. I don't think she even consulted for the cabinet. She just said it. And that was it.
And then the phase of time was brought forward by seven years. The consequences were very dramatic because had she not done this, Germany would still have nuclear power today. And it would... it would have been easier for Germany to weather the crisis of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. When Russia annexed Crimea, while she led some diplomatic effort afterwards, that effort was not... You know, successful.
And it was also basically not aimed at producing a solution. It was just a talking shop. This is what the Europeans do. They don't have troops on the ground, no backup. It's basically... just smokes and mirrors. And that's basically the diplomacy that she deployed. When Trump came to power, people talked about her as the leader of the Western War. It was stupid. Because Germany didn't do what leadership did.
required. It prioritized its gas pipeline project with Russia. It didn't give up anything. It didn't take the leadership in the Eurozone crisis. And I think there were two cardinal errors that were made. I mean, we can talk about nuclear power and immigration. I think the two cardinal errors were actually two different ones. The first one was the failure to fix the Eurozone crisis, because that was in 2012.
They should have really gone for a fiscal union, a banking union. They got themselves a banking union, but this is half-hearted, non-entity thing, and a capital markets union. If they had used the Euros in Christ to create this kernel of political union, but just very limited and not super ambitious, but 3-4% of GDP would have been more than enough to create a political union. And then...
to build on this by creating, moving towards a joint foreign defense policy. When Merkel visited Trump in 2018, She came back flustered. She wasn't flustered much, but she came back flustered, gave a speech, famously in a beard hat. uh in which she said oh my god this is really terrible uh we really got to work with you know we're going to have a european counterpart to america because this is going to be really bad with trump and um and nothing happened
You know, she did not invest political capital into this project. She could have stood up and Macron was already in power. He would have probably been, you know, a willing, a more than willing accomplice.
is for Germany and France to actually have a positive joint project. We need to build this. We need to go for... the gdp defense and gdp of at least two percent before you have to go more and we have to actually integrate our defense purchases make us more efficient because we have a lot of duplication going on is this is actually worse even
the actual defense spending. People talk far too much about these GDP numbers. It's much more important how we actually spend, how we organize this. It could have brought the British inside of this rather than fighting the British on Brexit.
It would have made a completely different, you know, we would be in a very different world today with Ukraine. We would have had an economy that would be standing up to China and America. We would have a defense system that would make us independent. We could choose.
support ukraine now because we are now in a position where if trump if trump leaves uh you know if trump you know enforces either enforces a really bad deal on ukraine or if this gets rejected you know trump can just pull out he can pull out of ukraine but He can also pull out of other parts of Eastern Europe and basically, you know, throw us to the wolves or the bears. And if he, you know, if...
you know, we would be in a position to actually, you know, pluck holes. We're not, we're weak. And that is the result of Angela Merkel's 16 year in office.
And do you think that the environment is changing in Germany on that question? I was listening only today to an interview with the head of the Axel Springer Media Group, who was saying that J.D. Vance's speech... in Munich should be seen as, I think the phrase that he used, an invitation to dance, that America wants a stronger Europe and that Europe should want a stronger Europe too.
I'm not sure. I think you're referring to Matthias Dobschmer, the head of the Springer group, which owns, built in Germany, Politico in Europe. and other things. He is certainly on the conservative spectrum and he's been known to support. support trump and uh i'm not surprised he supports shady vans speech i think jd vans actually also said a lot of right things about europe but we have to separate whether we agree or not with this and to the motivations of why he said it
You know, it looks to me at the moment that they're not looking for an alliance with Europe. They're looking for a reason to lose in the alliance with Europe. and leave Europe alone in charge of its own destiny. And the, you know, the troubles, the right wing parties will help them create a, you know, create this detachment from Europe away from America. And that to me is what I think Vance is after. I don't think we're looking at a new transatlantic alliance of...
of conservative socialism. I'm not sure this is what the plan is. And I think I would also not cite this as an example that Germany is willing to change because, you know, what Shady Vance was about in this Munich Security Conference speech is about freedom of speech. And in Germany, it is actually a criminal offence to insult people. In Britain, if I insulted you in my article, you could sue me for libel. You could make me very poor. In Germany, you can throw me to jail.
um it's a different thing you cannot make me poor though uh germany doesn't have these libel laws in terms of in terms of there are some defamation civil defamation cases but they're not they're not they're nothing like nothing like what the uk has or england has under the libel laws There are not many people in Germany who debate the economy in the way I do.
It's usually, you know, on the left, you have people who love the industrial model and want to make it more, you know, left-wing, more government spending, higher taxes. On the right, they love the... economic model and want to make it more right-wing, low taxes, etc. And in the middle, they also love the industrial model and want to make it green or whatever. There isn't anybody who disagrees with the industrial model. They all agree that...
the industrial model is what Germany not needs to do, that they need to be mercantilist, that they need to have huge export services, which if you actually, you know, we know a little bit about how these national accounts work, an export service is the same as a...
savings surplus or an investment deficit and that is the problem germany's especially the private sector is not investing the german private sector like bsf is investing in china others are investing in america that's what they do they invest abroad And that's what mercantilism does. It gives you some of a colonial expansion, but your own country is atrophied. This is also where the neo-mercantilism...
is actually different from the old mercantilism. The old mercantilism would give you gold. That was the old system, the Colbert, the French mercantilism. This doesn't give you any riches. You just get completely bowled over, basically. But it sounds as if, and you make this point also in the book, that this is not just a German problem. This is also a European problem, or I suppose in some ways an EU problem. Because the EU seems to be the worst of all worlds.
It's meddling and it's bureaucratic, but it's not unified or strong enough to institute something like the kind of things that you were talking about before, an industrial strategy or a foreign policy grand strategy to rival the United States. or even Russia. The fact that the United States and Russia can meet to decide the fate of Ukraine and not even bother to invite the EU, maybe that tells us everything that we need to know about Germany. and the EU.
I completely agree with you. This is a, you know, this is the symbol of what's going on, because, you know, I mean, it's not the cause or anything of what's going on, but it tells you of, you know, it's an underlying picture of our weakness and our weakness. that gets hidden by, you know, we have lots of fanboys who, you know, love the EU, you know, keep on writing how wonderful the EU is. But if you look at power politics, we don't matter in the world.
It's really, I'm really saying this quite bluntly. We don't matter in the world. We matter to each other. We are the only ones in the world who keep telling and reinforcing our backs over Ukraine. And any criticism of Zelensky, we saw this this week.
You know, you say a word and then suddenly people get completely upset about this. And, you know, this is, you know, normally in politics, you would criticize people and it would be normal. But we are basically... you know living in sort of some kind of a virtual signaling uh world and it's interesting in on this issue all the left and the right they all agree just as in germany everybody everybody has agreed and on on um you know on industry
there isn't much of a, you know, a voice of dissenter when Trump is basically saying something else, people get very, very flustered. And, you know, it's not that I actually agree with Trump and certainly not all. one of his points. I think he has more of a point in several of the things he said about Ukraine than is generally acknowledged in Europe, especially the role of NATO.
um after after 1990 uh and also the peace negotiation that took place at the beginning of the war that were frustrated because the western and the post, the West didn't want Ukraine to cut a deal. You know, there were a number of questions that should be asked about this war. And I, you know, I feel quite strongly that things, you know, that this was not a... And I always... in most of my columns that there's no way we could win this.
And it almost didn't matter because the entire discourse about it was all about who we are and what's right and what's wrong. And we fact check anything that Putin says and conclude that he's completely lying. And now we fact check everything that Trump says. as though that mattered. The fact that he's lying or not lying, it matters.
is irrelevant the fact is that he has the power that we don't and that we have chosen not to have the power now that matters and you know weakness is a choice and that's you know we were not we're not weak because others made us weak We are one of the richest people in the world. We could have allocated our resources differently. It was a choice that we made. It was a choice that we didn't have an economic union, a choice that we didn't organize our defenses.
in time for this conflict um and it's a choice that germany made by not diversifying these are all part of the same this is why this is a european problem one eu problem it is there is sort of a a stasis in our in our our society you know we can't just you know we couldn't just say okay let's let's let's reduce the welfare state and let's pour the money into lower taxes or let's stop the regulation let's go to the year the regulation of the last 10 years i mean
You described that you didn't do the political integration, so they did regulation instead. And that was a mistake. Catastrophic. And it turns out people took them a long time to realize a lot of stuff happened during COVID and nobody paid attention. And now we have a regulation. GDPR is a small business. I see this myself. GDPR, the data protection, is an absolute nightmare, especially in the EU. They have legislation that forces...
That essentially makes it very difficult to do any AI, especially in conjunction with the GDPR regulation. Social media are highly restricted. And this will be another subject of huge confrontation with America. And all of this is basically, you know, we're becoming the regulators, the old jokers, you know, America innovates, China imitates and we regulate. And it's unfair to China because they are now...
innovating at least as much as the Americas, but we're still regulating. I mean, that hasn't changed. What we could do is say, okay, we stop this. We actually go back to this regulation. This is what the sensible response is. Look back, just start from... from zero again and just just do what we need uh that would be a smart response but that's not happening you know they will they will it will take them 10 years to to fiddle with some of the some of the things they will not
it will not make a big change. That's why I'm ultimately very pessimistic about the change. It's not that I cannot, and I didn't actually, my book is not a policy book. And it's not a policy book for good reason, because a serious policy book would have been at least as long as my book. Yeah, it's a diagnosis. It's not a prescription. Really? That's what it is, yeah. I mean, finally, Wolfgang, I mean, when something is kaput...
especially in this digital age, we usually just throw it away. There are elections coming up, possibly AFD will make some kind of breakthrough during the elections. But I mean, on the bigger picture... Do you think that we're actually at the end of the post-war and post-Cold War settlement in Germany? And I know you've just said there that you don't want to speculate, but if that is the case, what does replace it?
Well, I think we always, you know, there's always our sort of thinking of, oh, something's bad, something's got to be fixed and something's going to get better. And, you know, you say when something's kaput, you replace it. But, you know, you might just keep it. I mean, you know, you might just have a broken car in your garage and, you know, it might be in your garage.
in 10 years full time. It's still not working, but you may not have replaced it because you couldn't bother to get a new one. And I think that's more of a likely scenario. Decline isn't dramatic. You know, especially if you're rich, decline means, you know, the AFD gets from 20% to 25%, and maybe one day it'll get 30%. And that's what decline means. Decline means unhappiness on the fringes.
It means more tension, especially if you bring in, you know, increased immigration. So, but I mean, the whole unhappiness in Europe. The far right is not a particular German phenomenon. German is actually lagging behind the Dutch, the Austrians, the Belgians. They all have had it, the French, they've had it for a long time. They're just unhappy. These are parties that feed on broad discontent. And there are a lot of people who are no longer part of the society. Germany has succeeded.
with this old model, succeeded for a surprisingly long time. It was about until 2015.
that the German society was pretty much united. There wasn't a right-wing movement either. The AfD was started around that time. But it started as a party by economics professors who wanted to leave the euro. It wasn't a far-right party. I mean, people... portrayed them as far right because leaving the euro was considered to be the most far right thing imaginable in germany at the time which is kind of absurd but it's here that was the thing um and
The party got since sort of hijacked, basically, by nationalists. And then the nationalists got kicked out by ultra-nationalists. And, you know, you never cease to learn. that it gets always more, you know, you can always go deeper to the right. There seems to be no end in terms of the space that they cannot occupy. But it doesn't mean that things get fixed. And I think we have to sort of also, you know, things get fixed.
If people want to fix them, I cannot identify a single party or a single politician in opposition who would even say, OK, this is what I'm campaigning on. And, you know, if you look at Britain in the 70s, Britain had declined in the 70s. And that was Thatcher, you know, a minister and then later an opposition leader. And she went on banging for a long time.
And, you know, there was one person, you know, in the United States during the unhappy 70s with Nixon and Carter. And there was Ronald Reagan. It didn't look like he would ever come into power, but at least there was somebody who talked about this stuff. I cannot identify somebody. And if I, you know, the way political systems work, you need majorities, you need Germany, you need coalitions. You know, where is this coalition coming from, that coalition of change? I don't see this.
So the book is Kaput, The End of the German Miracle. It's written by my guest Wolfgang Munchau and published by Swift Press. But for now, Wolfgang, congratulations again. Such a pleasure. Thanks for joining us on Bookstack.
Richard, thank you very much for inviting me. So that's it from us. Don't forget to check out Persuasion on Substack or go to persuasion.community. The show is produced by Laura Silverman. We're back in two weeks. But for now, this is me, Richard Alder, saying thanks for listening.