National Interest

by Jackson Janes and Markus Ziener

    German, American and Western democracies have become incapable of sustaining long-term reform.

    In the summer of 2003, Gerhard Schröder stood before the German Bundestag to deliver what amounted to a political suicide note. His Agenda 2010, a comprehensive package of labor market reforms, welfare cuts and structural adjustments that his own Social Democrats had spent decades opposing, he presented to lawmakers not as a political choice but as a structural necessity.

    While subsequent economic success proved him right, the political cost was fatal to his leadership. Within two years, he lost his parliamentary majority, called early elections and was removed from office. Angela Merkel replaced Schröder and governed for 16 years largely on the structural foundations her predecessor had established, while carefully avoiding any public acknowledgment of that political inheritance.

    This may be called the Schröder Paradox: essential structural reform yields programmatic success but results in the reformer’s political ruin. But this phenomenon is not exclusive to Germany. It represents a defining dilemma of governance within developed Western democracies, where political systems systematically punish the exact long-term governance they most require.

    This dynamic has become increasingly visible in the United States during the second year of President Donald Trump’s second term. The current American reality reflects neither systematic transformation nor traditional reform. Instead, it is institutional dismantling carried out without a coherent blueprint for what comes next.

    Donald Trump is pursuing his politics of disruption mainly through executive directives, threats and military operations. Courts blocked many of those directives, reversed them, or quietly complicated them. The federal bureaucracy was shaken up, demoralized and often hollowed out, but not modernized, not made more efficient, not better equipped to serve the country. So far Trump has produced only one major piece of legislation: the tax bill he calls the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which Congress passed in 2025.

    A comprehensive structural overhaul of the system is not visible and this is precisely what a president needs to deliver in his first two years, before the midterms begin to limit his room for maneuver. Political noise is replacing outcome.

    It would be a mistake, however, to frame all this as an isolated symptom of Trump’s political style. No single administration created the conditions that enabled a figure like Trump. They are systemic. Western democracies have built political mechanisms that respond strongly to the short-term preferences of voting majorities. An endless series of elections, constant polling and political infighting prevent politicians from pushing through unpopular but necessary measures. As a result, disruption moves in to fill the vacuum left by the absence of substantive reform.

    Disruption is the political response to this failure. It promises change without the lengthy, tedious process of reaching consensus and implementing policy. But disruption is not modernization. If applied continuously, as it is in the United States, it exhausts and eventually bores people.

    By the early 2000s, Germany was the “sick man of Europe,” a label The Economist applied as early as 1999. Unemployment was stubbornly high, the labor market was rigid and the stagnant economy could no longer finance the welfare state. Nine years after reunification, euphoria had long since given way to disillusionment. The costs of reunification weighed heavily on the now-enlarged country. The political atmosphere was precisely what we would now recognize as pre-disruptive: broad, unfocused public frustration with a governing class that seemed to manage decline more comfortably than address its causes.

    Schröder’s response was not what a Social Democrat would have wanted, but it was simply the only alternative. And the reforms worked. German unemployment, which had exceeded 11 percent in 2005, fell below 5 percent within a decade. Germany again became Europe’s primary economic dynamo.

    Schröder was personally bold and willing to take a risk. Yet, his reforms were also supported by a political landscape defined by a weak right-wing party, a media environment not yet fully colonized by the attention economy and electoral majorities that allowed considerably more room to maneuver.

    Those conditions have eroded. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who faces structural problems no less serious than those Schröder inherited, is operating on different terrain. His coalition is fragile, the media environment is noisier and the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) sits on his right flank waiting to harvest every point of pain that reform produces. Merz has the instincts the moment requires, but whether those instincts can be translated into actual reform under current conditions is an open question.

    The United States has no Schröder in its recent history. But there is a reason. The American political system is structurally hostile to this kind of reform. Electoral cycles are short, reelection pressure is constant and the institutional architecture ensures that a leader is always governing with one eye on the next campaign rather than the next decade. The rational response, under these conditions, is to avoid doing anything that might undermine your own power. Serious reform, which by definition produces winners and losers, becomes a political liability almost before it begins.

    The virtue of boring is precisely what the American system has spent a generation devaluing. The result is visible: a political culture that normalizes breaking things, that feeds the temptation to believe problems can be solved by bypassing normal processes and that rewards the performance of strength over the patient accumulation of results.

    The real problem is not a shortage of the right leaders. We have built political systems that make the right kind of leadership structurally unrewardable. Schröder was possible in 2003 because the conditions briefly aligned: a parliamentary system that concentrated accountability, institutional partners capable of absorbing the shock of reform, a media environment that had not yet fully monetized outrage. Those conditions are now harder to reproduce almost everywhere.

    Waiting for the right person to emerge is therefore the wrong response. The architecture of the systems themselves needs to change. For this to happen, it would require a joint effort by the political center, which is shrinking as the political landscape fragments around it.

    While it is not yet clear whether Merz will succeed in Germany, one can predict for the United States: whoever leads after Trump will have to make a hard calculation about what of the Trump moment to retain and what to discard. Some of what disruption has exposed will not simply dissolve: the genuine failures of institutional performance, the legitimate frustrations with a political class that managed problems rather than solving them. A post-Trump leader who ignores this is almost certain to fail. The question is whether those frustrations can be channeled into something that actually builds capacity rather than continuing to perform its destruction.

    Schröder had no guarantee it would work. He did it anyway. That, in the end, may be the only available definition of political courage and the only one that actually matters.