Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has caused a stir. Not by some kind of success, in, for instance, elections, the economy, or foreign and domestic policy. Scholz does not do that kind of thing. For a man with his ratings, crowd pleasing is not even an option.

Even though they may indeed mean Scholz’s days are numbered, as the British Telegraph surmises, the devastating defeats his Social-Democratic party and its 'traffic-light' coalition partners – the Greens and the market-liberal Free Democrats – have just suffered in regional elections in Thuringia and Saxony are just the tip of the iceberg, as polls consistently show: A whopping 77% of Germans consider their current leader “führungsschwach” (weak at, well, leading); his personal “popularity” – really, unpopularity – rating has just collapsed from a dismal 14th to a comically catastrophic 18th place. Only 23% want him to even try to run for office again, and even in his own party the majority is against the idea.

And it’s not just him alone but his team as well: 71% of Germans think his government is doing a bad job. A difficult – and foul – 2025 budget compromise achieved in July within Scholz’s fractious coalition did not inspire hope: Only 7% of voters believed that the coalition “partners” would work together more effectively now, 10% thought things would only get worse, and 79% that they’d stay just as dire as they were. While Scholz’s government had promised that the new budget would finally jolt the ailing German economy back to life, 75% of Germans didn’t believe in that promise. And who can blame them? The German economy, hobbled by both self-imposed budgetary constraints that rule out stimulus politics and then the insane abandonment of inexpensive Russian energy, has been stagnating since 2018; as of now it has entered a “technical recession.”

That was the mood at the end of July. By now, it’s bound to be much worse: The coalition’s rickety budget compromise is under heavy fire from, among others, Professor Hanno Kube, “one of the most respected constitutional jurists” of Germany, according to leading news magazine Der Spiegel. Kube, one should recall, has helped bring down Berlin’s shady accounting practices once before, triggering a deep and reverberating political crisis that the traffic-light accomplices have never fully overcome.

And Volkswagen, nothing less than a national symbol and by far Germany’s biggest employer in the country’s........

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