What mess? I'm not German, but from living here, it feels like the German state is sort of working OK. A benchmark that I feel is pretty fair is COVID death num

What mess? I'm not German, but from living here, it feels like the German state is sort of working OK. A benchmark that I feel is pretty fair is COVID death numbers. Germany does OK. Countries like the UK completely fumbled the whole thing, so a bunch of people died. There aren't really a lot of other grounds of direct comparison: certainly, the UK economy has been tanking, but there are confounders there, and the UK has a poor (and flat-lining) life-expectancy, but perhaps that's just a consequence of the COVID thing. In general though, I feel like the UK has just plummeted on all the stats, except perhaps, the number of union jacks per square meter, in the last decade or so. Granted, Germans are more racist.