Germany Is Reopening. And Learning a Tough Lesson.

The way out of a lockdown is much harder than the way in

Op-ed by Anna Sauerbrey @ NYTimes.com, May 18

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Germany was lucky to be late in line, most experts agree. The distress in Italy, and before that in China, was sobering: German citizens knew the stakes and adapted accordingly. And crucially, both the country’s politics and the health care system proved to be up to the task. “I was surprised to see how very flexibly Germany’s health care system reacted to the crisis,” Wolfgang Greiner, a professor of health care economics at the University of Bielefeld, told me. Both the market — most labs are private companies, as are many hospitals — and the political steering worked.

On May 6, the country’s 16 states agreed to ease the lockdown. The guiding principle is regional autonomy, with each state pretty much in charge of its own way out, following only rough common guidelines. There’s one condition: If the number of new cases rises above 50 in 100,000 inhabitants across seven days in an area, the local authorities must reinstall restrictions.

Experts disagree on the wisdom of the strategy. “Instead of knocking the whole country out with a nationwide lockdown,” said Professor Greiner, who supports the approach, “we now have better monitoring in place and can react regionally.” But Karl Lauterbach, a lawmaker from the Social Democratic Party and an epidemiologist, disagrees. “The way we’re easing the lockdown is unsystematic,” he told me. He’s afraid that states may outbid each other as they try to jump-start regional economies and cater to voters’ hunger for life.

The real trouble, however, goes much deeper. The economy is in disarray: 10.1 million Germans have applied for wage subsidies; many have lost their jobs, particularly those in precarious work and the service sector. Projections suggest that the economy, which has officially entered recession, will shrink somewhere between 6 to 20 percent. The loss in tax revenues will be substantial — nearly 100 billion euros, or $108 billion, by one estimate. And the country’s debt burden will soar.

The question is: Who will pay? That quandary is likely to define the next months and years, setting off a dirty lobbying war — as companies vie for concessions, support and contracts — and political turmoil. The Social Democratic Party wants to “tax the rich,” while the Christian Democrats are expected to retable their age-old idea of cutting corporate taxes. Their governing coalition could fracture. More difficulties lie ahead.

And right now, demons old and new are out on the streets. Just a few weeks ago, Germans sniffed at gun-waving Americans protesting the lockdown. But the schadenfreude was short lived. On May 8, thousands of protesters — a wild mix of extremists, conspiracy theorists and ordinary citizens, supported in large part by the far-right populist Alternative for Germany Party — flocked to the streets of major cities like Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart, claiming their rights were under threat and touting conspiracy theories. On Saturday, they turned out again: 5,000 gathered in Stuttgart, and smaller demonstrations dotted the country.

The protesters speak for very few: A clear majority of the population backs the restrictions. But it’s a bitter irony that in the country’s brief moment of vindication, all the old conflicts are re-emerging. It makes the early togetherness look shallow, a product of our instincts for survival rather than of humanitarian insight.

So instead of solidarity, we have strife. In place of unity, division. It looks like this is Germany’s new normal, too.