ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes what the Covid-19 crisis reveals about Germany and the political, economic, social, and cultural structures of its governance. Despite almost 10,000 SARS-CoV-2-related deaths within the pandemic’s first six months, the country’s fatality as well as infection and hospitalization rates were consistently lower than in the United States or any large European country. The article discusses the extent to which this can be attributed to geography, timing, leadership, policy, medical capacity, and the corporatist federal institutional framework. It examines how its coordinated social market economy shaped the response to the pandemic, which involved the sudden shift from a longstanding politics of austerity to the largest federal spending package in the country’s history. It explores the broad social acceptance of the government’s measures, paying particular attention to the impact of benefits and burdens on social inequality across social sectors. It assesses institutional performance through feature-specific comparisons and by contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Among the timely lessons to be learned is the need for a strengthening of anticipative governance capacity.
