[MENTION=4347]Virtual ghost[/MENTION]
I thought you might be interested in a recent poll from Germany. It's a survey about how people are dealing with the current corona crises:
What is the greatest challenge Germany is facing? 53% of young people (18-25) say it's climate change. 50% of older people (45+) say it's corona. Across all generations 13% say it's refugees and 1% says it's terrorism.
Young people say they would be willing to sacrifice 30% of their income to combat corona, older people say they'd sacrifice 18%.
Hoarding seems to have diminished.
General satisfaction ith life seems to remain high across the board. (I also often look at an informal monitor by an online newspaper that asks its readers how they are feeling today and allows them to make up one-word-answers that, due to the possibilitie of the German language, can be whole sentences such as "annoyedbyMerkel"....well, recently the mood in the country seems to be positive and even better than usual, could be because of the lovely weather though)
80% trust the government in handling the crises and 86% support the measures taken. Even 2/3 of those who generally distrust and dislike the government support the measures. Those numbers have only gone down minially since the beginning of the lockdown.
That doesn't mean that people love Merkel or voted for any of the two parties of the govermentv coalition or would vote for them at the next election. But I think many people, like myself, tend to differentiate. I never voted for the CDU in my entire life and have no intention of ever doing so, yet I will gladly defend Merkel and the coalition government (impefect as they are). As much as I dislike Markus Söder (governor of Bavaria) and the CSU, I readily admit that he handled the stuation very well in Bavaria. I can agree with certain measures or positions even if I disagree with the ideology of the person taking them. Occasionally I can even like politicians as people even though they are in the "wrong" party.
In that regard the country seems to be divided into supporters of the AfD (distrustful of anything and anyone and generally against "the system") and the rest of the country which can still get together and agree on things despite their differences. Coalitions have a long tradition anyway, so by now even conservatives and socially liberal Greens governing together is not considered unusual. It is often said that trust is an enormous asset in a society, be it trust in one's fellow citizen/neighbor or trust in the scientific community and doctors or trust in the government acting in good faith. Social trust is of monumental importance and the basis of so many aspects of mental and physical health, economic prosperity and general wellbeing of the population. An errosion of social trust is a great danger for any developed country, I think. So it makes me optimistic to see that there is still so much of it left, at least in this part of the world.
Once again, this is not about agreeing with or supporting everything a government or a social elite does but about an assumption of good faith as default modus. After all, that is the basis of the social contract.
