GERMANY: The powerhouse of Europe, a giant holding up the continental economy on its mighty shoulders.
Its citizens so hard-working, so rational, so efficient. First the European Union, now the Champions League trophy have fallen into the hands of our Teutonic overlords.
You might think world domination is just around the corner. And then you read something that takes your breath away. Germany has lost 1.5 million people.
OK, it hasn’t ‘lost’ them in the sense of having mislaid them behind the sofa. Nor have all those people been ‘disappeared’ before we start re-opening any dark chapters of history.
But the fact remains that an inventory of Germans has come up 1.5 million short.
The German government announced last week that the 2011 census had found the population was 80.2 million – way below the number which officials had assumed they would get. It’s as if Germany has lost a city the size of Birmingham overnight.
What’s even stranger is that the Germans have been so lazy with their head counts over the past 20 years.
Knowing the number of people in your country is a pretty fundamental thing for any well-run society. Yet the Germans don’t seem that fussed about it.
The last East German census took place in 1981, while the capitalist running dogs in the west held a head count in 1987.
Twenty-four years and one ex-wall later, the Germans finally got round to holding another census.
This sort of shockingly slipshod accounting would be no surprise if it happened further south, in one of those countries which the Germans have spent the last few years bailing out.
But for the Teutonic tutors to get it so badly wrong is scarcely believable.
Maybe the euro’s in even more trouble than we thought.
