The most important man in Germany this month is the football coach
However, the rise of the far right is not the only crisis Germany is facing. The economy is in the doldrums: only 28 percent of companies say they are doing well, according to one recent surveyand confidence in Mr Scholz’s government has plummeted. Southern Germany is suffering from the floods that killed six people in June, while the main transport waterways of the Rhine and Danube dry up so often that shipping has to be stopped regularly.
“There’s the economy, a lack of innovation, infrastructure problems, inflation, a slow bureaucracy,” said Dr. Echterhoff, professor of psychology, ticked off Germany’s misery like a shopping list. “And that’s before we get to multiple international crises, like Russia’s war in Ukraine. All this together has put Germany’s self-esteem under real threat.”
It is therefore not surprising that the run-up to the European Championship is relatively quiet.
“The thing about the mood, especially the mood in the country, is that you can’t really measure it,” Dirk Peitz, a columnist for the newspaper Die Zeit, wrote this week. All he could do, he said, was use himself as an example of a mood. “I don’t feel it, this tournament. Not at all.”
A diverse team
In the run-up to the European Championship, the German team has drawn on the iconography of its diversity. Adidas, the team’s main sponsor, has created an advertising campaign playing with the idea of what is and is not ‘typically German’. Gündogan, born in Germany to Turkish parents, plays a prominent role. Nagelsmann, unconventionally young, does that too.
Most telling, however, is one of the ad’s opening images, which follows a fan wearing a Croatian jersey under a German jersey. In a country where about 30 percent of the population can claim immigrant roots, supporting two teams is now as “typically German” as Goethe and Schiller and winning on penalties.
