For much of its postwar history, Germany was a beacon of prosperity and political stability. Now its economy is stagnating and social harmony has given way to acrimony and division.
Germany’s grossly unequal distribution of wealth is an underappreciated cause of this malaise: The top 10% of households have at least €725,000 ($793,000) of net assets and control more than half of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 40% of households have at most €44,000 of net assets, according to a Bundesbank survey in 2021.
Together with a pervasive sense that Germany is coming unstuck — think creaking infrastructure, inflation and the loss of cheap Russian gas — economic precarity makes Germans susceptible to fringe arguments that their living standards are threatened and the government is out of touch. In the long term, Europe’s biggest economy must reform its labor-penalizing tax system and promote a broader distribution of capital.