Was geht Deutschland?

What's up Germany?

In the hours after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, on the other side of the Atlantic, the German government collapsed. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner. In a televised address, Scholz said his firing “was necessary to prevent harm to our country.”

The dismissal of a cabinet member might not have garnered much attention outside of Germany, let alone collapsed the government if it wasn’t for the fact that Scholz rules with a coalition.

His center-left party (the Social Democratic Party, SDP) rules with support from “The Greens” (center left) and the “Free Democratic Party” (FDP, center right). At the helm of the FDP’s support was Lindner, which meant firing him caused the FDP to pull its support from Scholz’s coalition—creating what local Germans call a “traffic light crisis.” Now, Scholz has a smaller coalition, and Germany has announced federal elections for February 23, initially slated for next September.

This alone is quite stunning. Shortly after one political earthquake in the US, the world’s largest economy, a separate political earthquake struck Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy.

But this is not the full picture.

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