As Germany’s federal elections approach this weekend, chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats (SPD) are bracing for their worst results since 1887. The SPD is battling with its equally unpopular coalition partner, the Green Party, for a humiliating third place, behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The coming bloodbath for Scholz’s government speaks to far more than the haplessness of his leadership or the unpopularity of his party. Germany has just endured two years of recession – the longest economic slump in its postwar history. Industry is in freefall, shedding almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs since the start of the pandemic. A series of terror attacks by Islamists and asylum seekers has made many Germans wonder if the state can do its basic duty to keep them safe. Talk of German efficiency and punctuality now sounds like a sarcastic joke, as roads and bridges fall into disrepair, trains are routinely late and infrastructure projects are plagued by delays and cost overruns. One in five German children lives in poverty. Germany is not merely in an economic downtown – it faces a profound structural crisis, largely of its elites’ own making.

None of these problems began in earnest in the Scholz era. The chancellor is merely the current frontman for a long-running ‘consensus’ that has now become unsustainable and unsupportable. Tellingly, at the last federal elections in 2021, Scholz campaigned as the continuity candidate following the long reign of CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, under whom he served as vice-president and finance minister in a ‘grand coalition’. He even aped her signature ‘Merkel rhombus’ hand gesture to ram this point home. The accusation that ‘politicians are all the same’ rings far truer in Germany than elsewhere. Every mainstream party is implicated in this crisis.

Foreign admirers of Germany praise the ability of its politicians to form a consensus, rather than squabble or try to score partisan points. This is what makes Germany a ‘grown-up country’, as John Kampfner puts it in his staggeringly poorly aged 2021 book, Why the Germans Do it Better.