A year on, Olaf Scholz’s promise of transformation is only partly kept

Just three days after Russia unleashed its “special military operation” to grab Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s freshly elected chancellor, proclaimed a moment of epochal change. The term he used in a speech to parliament on February 27th last year was Zeitenwende, a “turning in time”. The last such shift, known to Germans simply as Die Wende, was the movement of 1989-90 that reunited communist East Germany with the capitalist West.