Gauck's supporters, however, will get their wish. Wulff had to resign in February when it was revealed that he had accepted free vacations. Gauck was elected as president in March with the support of all parties except Die Linke. It nominated Beate Klarsfeld, the Nazi-hunting activist and advocate for Holocaust memory.

This was a coup on the part of Die Linke, since their great blunder of the last two years — aside from blocking Gauck — was to give qualified support to the Turkish flotilla trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. No German party until then had set itself up in opposition to Israeli foreign policy, and voters were uncomfortable when Die Linke did. If nominating Ms Klarsfeld was meant to induce public amnesia, however, it didn't quite work. The Frankfurter Allgemeine revealed that Ms Klarsfeld, at the time of a protest against West Germany chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in the 1960s, during which she berated him for his Nazi past, had collected 2,000DM from the East German leadership, considerably more riddled with ex-Nazis than the West German one.

Germany is experiencing more political tumult now than you would expect from perhaps the world's most successful major economy. The country is clearly moving left. Last winter, residents in Stuttgart became incensed over the wrecking of their city's historic train station to make way for a €4-billion commercial centre. They rallied behind a Green candidate who ousted the Christian Democrats from the governorship of Baden Württemberg for the first time in almost 60 years. Chancellor Merkel can read the writing on the wall. Her coalition partners, the free-market FDP, have collapsed — they no longer win enough votes to qualify for state parliaments anywhere they run and she must now audition a new cast of coalition partners. The Social Democrats, with whom she shared power to the satisfaction of the public between 2005 and 2009, appear most likely to get the role. At her party's convention in Leipzig in November, Merkel rallied her members behind a minimum wage, and she has agreed to close all the country's nuclear power plants within the next decade. Observers speak of a "Social Democratisation" of the CDU. 

But some are planning for a future in which voters will not be satisfied with a mere change of minority party in the ruling coalition. Gerhard Schick, a Bundestag member who is the finance spokesman of the Greens, believes that inequalities of wealth and income must be dealt with post-haste. He notes that the vision of the Occupy movement — of a world divided between the "99 per cent" and the "1 per cent" — resonates in Germany. "When people hear, ‘We benefit from the euro'," he says, "they ask, ‘Well, who's benefiting at the moment? The upper 1 per cent or maybe the upper 10 per cent, but not me.'" The Greens have proposed a levy on property. Similarly confiscatory taxation ideas have sent French presidential candidate François Hollande rocketing in the polls.