As Germans processed the news of Donald Trump’s re-election on Wednesday, they were soon hit by a story much closer to home – their coalition government was about to collapse.
As Der Spiegel journalist Regina Steffens explains to Helen Pidd, though the divisions within the government were well-known, it still came as a shock. This, after all, is a country that values political stability and has not seen a government collapse in more than 40 years.
Yet still, as author John Kampfner argues, it is a crisis that has been long coming, caused not only by political mismanagement but by deep, structural problems in Germany’s economy, its politics and maybe even by a cultural aversion to risk.
Still, could a new government give Germany a chance to restart?
