THE BOSSES of Germany’s 3.6m medium-sized and small manufacturing firms would have loved to see last year’s general election yield a pro-business government of the centre-right Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). What the Mittelstand got instead was a pact between the Social Democrats (SPD), the FDP and the Greens. That is still too leftie for many tastes. But it could have been worse. Plenty of chief executives feared that Olaf Scholz, the new SPD chancellor, would row back his pre-election vow not to form a business-bashing coalition that would include Die Linke, a hard-left party.
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