Germany's Covid-19 success — and failure

Germany's Covid-19 success — and failure

By German Lopez. 

Last summer, it looked like Germany had conquered Covid-19, with the country swinging back open and the New York Times praising the “German exception.” Today, the country remains in lockdown as its Covid-19 cases have regularly surged, and deaths per capita even surpassed the US peak in December and January.

 

So what went wrong? In short, federalism.

 

Similar to the US, Germany maintains a federalist governing structure. There’s a federal government, currently led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, and 16 state governments, each with their own governor.

 

This system seemed to work well at first. In the early days of the pandemic, Germans were united in their concern about the coronavirus. They tuned into Merkel’s speeches, heeding her warnings about how quickly the virus could spiral out of control. And politicians from different factions generally followed her leadership.

 

In this context, the city of Jena became the first in the country to adopt a mask mandate. Given that this was early in the pandemic — late March and April — there was skepticism about whether it could work.

 

But it did: Mask use in Jena was nearly universal, and local cases flattened out. Pretty soon, the rest of the country followed suit, and every state put a mask mandate in place.

 

It was an example of the “laboratories of democracy” theory at work: A local or state government adopted a policy, it worked, and the rest followed. That, ideally, is how federalism is supposed to work.

 

It was in this spirit that much of Germany tried a long list of measures, from lockdowns to test-and-trace, to suppress Covid-19 enough to open up by the summer.

 

As fall approached, that began to change. With the pandemic dragging on, and as an election to replace Merkel (in September 2021) drew closer, some politicians questioned the need for Covid-19-related restrictions. The 16 states struggled to agree on what to do in response to rising cases, only agreeing to a “lockdown lite” initially and then tougher restrictions in November — once cases were more than triple the previous peak in the spring.

 

Even after those agreements, the country’s politicians have continued to publicly argue about whether these measures are necessary. That was clear during the week of Ash Wednesday in February, often used by German politicians to preview electoral messaging and criticize their opponents.

 

Two rivals from Merkel’s faction and vying to replace her, Armin Laschet and Markus Söder, went back and forth on the lockdown. Laschet said the government restrictions treated voters like “underaged children,” while Söder argued that those seeking to “profit from Merkel in September” should support her policies.

 

Nearly a year earlier, Germans could turn on their TVs and hear a unified message from Merkel. Now, even those in Merkel’s own faction are publicly disagreeing.

 

The crisis “became more of a cooperation problem, in which everyone has a strong incentive to deviate from a common solution,” Fabian Hattke at the University of Hamburg told me.

 

The takeaway: Federalism can work well when the country generally agrees on a problem, but it can fall apart in the face of serious disagreement.

 

The US is no stranger to that, as America’s federalist system and red-blue divide have led to very different responses to Covid-19. But it also applies to a range of issues, from climate change to guns to voting rights, where states have taken vastly different approaches — at times disagreeing on whether a problem is a problem at all.

 

Germany’s experience with Covid-19 provides an encapsulated example of what the good and bad of this system can look like in the real world — and how quickly a form of government that enables divisions can fall apart in the face of a truly national challenge.