The Eurozone crisis has set even the rigid German political landscape in flux. Merkel’s seemingly post-political governance, with what from many a German’s perspective appears as benign paternal strictness towards the continent, has attracted voters with its siren call of stability and morality. Paradoxically, this has come at the expense of both the Social Democrats and the neoliberal FDP, which is in death throes.

As Wolfgang Streeck argues, the coalition of the SPD and the CDU may best be understood today as two faces of one larger Volkspartei representing Germany writ large. Germany especially is big enough, and its position in Europe comfortable enough, for its European policy to rest on the stereotype of free-riding southern Europeans profiting at the expense of virtuous, hard-working Northerners, whose interests only Germany can protect.

It falls to the Left in Germany, which has made fairly little progress on domestic and European issues in the crisis, to break through this narrative. One positive signal in terms of greater pan-European solidarity was Die Linke party co-leader Bernd Riexinger’s trip to Athens, simultaneously with Merkel in 2012, which saw him protesting side-by-side with Tsipras. This, however, earned Die Linke near-universal disapproval among German voters.