To see people practising martial arts and attending the Tridentine Mass in the morning, and, in the evening, enjoying local cuisine, loudly singing old French songs, and joyously talking about the future is something I will never forget—and I wish, perhaps in vain, that it could be repeated throughout Europe.

Having managed the country with the sole aim of keeping her ‘clientelist’ system in power for as long as possible, Angela Merkel is disappearing from the political scene—just as the first cracks in the German ‘ship of state’ are beginning to show.