I think Germany's strength of economy was its dominance in exports. That's I think is over. The ageing population isn't gonna help them either.

Imagine if school teachers and journalists taught and wrote like this.

Great work Tom. So glad I’ve set up notifications for your posts!

Looking at the graph it looks German economy has been standstill like a statue.

Germany, like other European countries, decided to outsource their industries to Chinese labor at a low cost, exposing their intellectual property. See what happened!

To understand the decline of German manufacturing and productivity it helps to understand how Chinas has risen as Germany has declined.

China is not the only factor involved here but it is a major contributor.

Peter Hesslers book 'Country Driving' explains the methodology China has adopted to reverse engineer and out compete western manufacturing, brilliantly.

While I suspect the climate change issue is not a creation of convenience but rather is a potentially serious threat to human life there certainly will be a degree of truth that efforts to implement government led incentives to address the causes of climate change will frequently be captured by rentseeking opportunists and political opportunists. Where I differ is the root causes of this malfunctioning of our democracies. It is the combination of apathy on the part of citizens and the fine honing of corporate patronage of political parties. The source of the apathy and thus lack of sufficient grassroots democratic participation is complex and hard to exactly explain but it is at least in part a result of he increasing 'diversity' of most liberal western democracies- the lack of a unity of purpose and a result of decades of relative wealth. There is a tiredness about our European and US cultures. We have dominated the planet for centuries, enslaving or at least subjugating almost every other culture on the planet. Now China is rising and is led by a highly focussed politburo who are mostly trained as engineers. They are building a new empire to recreate what they see as the natural order of things where China is the most developed nation on earth, as it was just 500 years ago when Marco Polo saw it. China is reverse engineering the wests mercantile imperial model of the 19th century and has already achieved supremacy in terms of its ability to import commodities and manufacture them into the goods that other nations want and need. The manufacturing giants of the west like Germany have been outdone at their own game. Although Chinas model does not yet (and might never?) achieve the level of creativity in science and thought that the west has achieved, it might not need to. It might be enough to capture the mechanisms of global control that are currently held by Europe and USA. China might even be better suited to confront and address such real problems as climate change- the west is too compromised, tired, captured by banks and other parasitic rentseeking capital/corporates. Chinas politics while not democratic in a western sense are also not captured by corporate sponsors as the wests are now. The west has lost the ability to have a united and focused purpose. Its citizens are too consumed with what they demand from their government or simply cynicism and lack of any trust in their governments which is more or less justified due to the corporate capture. It is not yet certain that the west will fall and China will rule, but that is the current trajectory and you cannot simplistically blame the government because ultimately we are all the government. Chinas CCP knows it is not a communist government. It knows if it does not deliver improvements it faces a real chance of being removed by popular uprising. The wests 'governments' are effectively the corporate sponsors- the crony capitalists, who control the banking and issuance of capital via fiat and they cannot be so easily removed because they hide behind their paid proxies who call themselves your elected representatives.

stagnation all across the EU with most companies spending most of their time figuring out how they can get more EU subsidies

It seems that everything is paralyzed waiting for something. I hope this paralysis ends soon because otherwise it will drag down the entire European economy.