It is now little more than a “developing country”. Its stock market is a “junk shop” selling old tat. And its reputation as a place to do business has “never been so bad’. In the middle of the UK’s dismal election campaign, it would be easy to imagine that Britain was the country under discussion.
But Theodor Weimer, the head of the once mighty Deutsche Börse, was describing his native Germany. And he was absolutely right. After a series of catastrophic policy mistakes by centrist leaders, there is no way back for Germany – and its decline is only going to accelerate from here.
In a speech to Bavarian business leaders delivered back in April, but only made public when it was posted on YouTube this week, Weimer certainly didn’t mince his words. A country that prided itself on its efficiency, that saw itself as the engine of Europe and boasted of its formidable export machine was, as he put it, slipping to third world status.
The coalition government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz was, he argued, a “catastrophe”, Germany was “economically on the way to becoming a developing country” and “one thing is clear: our reputation in the world has never been so bad”.