In Charts: Germany’s Economy Was Once the Envy of Europe. Not Anymore

While the United States and most of the European Union have increased the shoulders of the pandemic recession and restarted their economic engines, Germany remains in slow motion.

Its economy shrink slightly In 2024, after adjusting the price increase. Forecasts for this year are not much better.

And other measures seem even worse. They show an economy that quickly slides back, Superb drops This has become one of the biggest problems in the parliamentary elections that take place on Sunday.

The situation is nothing less than a national crisis. A country that has long proclaimed its work ethics and its manufacturing power is now to look at the world rivals running in front of it.

“Economic policy in Germany is in tatters,” said Stefan Pallesch, owner of a kitchen store in the country region of the country in the touch of a political rally in the city of Stromberg, this month. He then listed several industries in crisis, including construction, traditional automation and electric vehicles.

Business managers and many worried voters use the same word when describing what is wrong: competitiveness. They feel like they are a football star who suddenly cannot find the net, or a marathoner who cannot follow the lead group. And they feel like it happened almost overnight.

“I really believe that we can compete,” said Christian Klein, CEO of the software giant in German SAP, “but some fundamentals must change.”

The graphics below show what it looks like when an economy quickly loses its advantage. They tell a brutal story of industrial misfortune and challenges of the workforce, with few possibilities of short-term turnarounds of the kind of promising German politicians while arguing the chancelle.

‘Stuck in stagnation’

Overall, it is impossible to miss the difficulties of Germany. Start with growth, which has contributed to Germany the third world economy, but has only cracked 2% per year since 2017. After adapting to the rise in prices, the German economy is not more large today that five years ago. Government forecasters predict an anemic growth rate of 0.3% This year.

“Germany is stuck in stagnation,” said economic minister Robert Habeck at the end of last month.

This is partly because German leaders have taken a big bet on globalization that has not yet paid off. Even with a large consumer base at home, German companies count on foreign markets for sales growth. More than four -fifths of the German economy depends on the tradeCompared to approximately a quarter of the American economy. The threat of a world trade war, stimulated by prices from the Trump administration, is looming on everything.

The market that once seemed to be the most promising, China, seems to be heavier. German exports to China culminated in 2022 and decreased, even if China is developing. This has drained fuel for growth. German companies have not yet found other markets to replace their slowdown Chinese sales.

High costs, low request

A large part of the economic identity of Germany is wrapped in its factories: cars, chemicals, pharmaceutical products, even Espresso manufacturers. This makes the difficulties of the sector all the more painful.

Manufacturing falls as an engine of the German economy. While German factories were the desire for Europe, they are no longer. They are not even superior to the average, in terms of exit.

After decades of German manufacturing braking at much higher rates than its European counterparts, Germany slowed down more from its production lines last year than the European Union as a whole.

The owners of factories, executives and workers all name the same culprit for this slide: arrow energy costs. It takes a lot of power to manage a factory, and the Germans pay more for that than their neighbors. German politicians pushed the country Before the pandemic to close its nuclear power plants and accelerate the imports of natural gas from Russia. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the gas flow has stopped and the energy costs have soaked.

The country has quickly invested in renewable sources such as wind and solar energy, but the country’s high energy costs remain a huge burden for companies trying to compete with competitors in Europe, Asia and America, where the electricity costs less.

A less competitive workforce

In addition to high energy costs, economists and business leaders complain that the characteristics of the German labor pool are disadvantage. German workers are more expensive than their counterparts across Europe, largely because time wages are significantly higher than in homologous countries.

And as a whole, its population works less.

The country has also experienced changes in workers’ preferences, often influenced by government policies.

In 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, around 14% of Germans worked part -time. This number has more than doubled, 30%.

Even full -time workers record less hours. And Germany has increased in the number of days that workers call patients, with an average of 22 recorded in 2023, according to the German Economic Institute.

Politicians through the political spectrum agree that the country needs more workers and will be for decades to come. The German Baby-boom in the post-war period later came than that of America, and it only shows the wave of retirements of workers of this generation.

Conservative politicians of the Chancellors’ race have promised to limit the payments of government well-being to people who can work, but who choose not to do so. Economists say the country’s policies and its social standards, discourage women in particular to work more.

The labor crisis would be even worse without the millions of refugees and other migrants that Germany has taken from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past decade. Economists say they have helped fill the holes left by pensions and the transition to part -time work.

Last year, researchers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris reported that Germany had a 70% employment rate for immigrants in 2022. It was significantly higher than most other countries in the European Union.

The elevation of migration, however, also set the German company and has become a question of voting. In particular in certain parts of the country where factory production fell, voters have adopted politicians who promise to block new refugees and expel those who are already there.

For some voters, it is a complaint closely linked to their experience of economic decline: the country, they say, no longer resembles Germany in which they grew up, and they want the old to return.