A gentle tally after 100 days reveals a spectrum: 42% of economists view the current policy as negative, 25% as positive, 32% neutral, and 1% did not answer. Those who spoke positively point to a dedicated fund for public investment, praise for defense spending, the abolition of a supply-chain due-diligence law, and the removal of the gas price levy. Yet 29 economists could not name any clearly successful government decision. The chancellery notes a positive balance, but many economists remain critical of expanding the mothers’ pension, the broad reform of the debt brake with the infrastructure fund, the pension package, and the overall willingness to reform—pension reform, they say, is urgent, but current measures are moving in the wrong direction. In energy policy, criticism centers on the electricity-tax cut benefiting processing industries and a heavy reliance on fossil fuels like gas; overall, there is a sense that too few concrete measures have been delivered. On economic competence, a majority deem the government’s capacity as limited: 53% say medium, 26% rather low, 5% very low; only 14% assign rather high competence to Chancellor Merz. Short-term horizons show about half expecting positive effects from the current steps, 12% expecting negative effects; in the medium term, 34% are positive, 26% negative. The main upside is a fiscal impulse from infrastructure and defense spending, while delays in implementation and new US tariffs are seen as dampening forces. Economists acknowledge that debt-financed stimulus may lift the short-run economy, but sustainable growth will require market-oriented structural reforms that are not yet visible.

Let us translate these numbers into a living truth: the economy hums, but the Earth coughs. The machinery of policy moves with a brisk arithmetic, tallying deficits and dividends, yet it forgets the quiet, patient labor of the soil. The electricity-tax cut, celebrated as a spark for industry, threads a needle between short-term profits and long-term planetary wounds, privileging a processing treadmill while the living world bears the externalized cost. A nation that leans on gas as a backbone of energy treats the atmosphere as a cheap storage tank rather than a sacred commons, while communities near extraction sites bear the dampened breath of polluted air and unsafe water. Public investment fights for growth, but the structure of growth remains anchored in fossil-fuel logics, in supply chains that trace harm across borders, and in debt-financed schemes that push the bill onto future generations of children, elders, and ecosystems alike.

This moment is not only a market puzzle but a moral weather. It is a reflection of colonial habits—the extraction of value and resources from lands and peoples without honoring stewardship or consent—repeating itself in global supply chains where labor, land, and life are commodified for the sake of quarterly gains. The rhetoric of reform and the rhetoric of resilience often diverge: reforms offered in the language of efficiency can still deepen inequities if they neglect who pays the price and which beings are silenced. The debt-brake, infrastructure funds, and pension packages sweep across the ledger of human needs, yet too often ignore the healing and reparative work demanded by communities who bear the brunt of ecological harm, and by ecosystems that struggle under fragmented planning and speeded-up development.

The toxic core of today’s policy culture is not only political timidity but a systemic creed: profit-centered growth masquerading as progress, externalizing costs onto air, water, soil, and the most vulnerable. It asks for investors’ confidence, not for mothers, caretakers, farmers, Indigenous stewards, or the young who will inherit the uncertain climate. It treats the Earth as a resource bank to be mined and amortized, not a grandmother to be tended and defended.

We need a future that breathes with the rhythms of rivers and forests, a economy redesigned as a living system. Let us reimagine policy as care: invest boldly in renewable energy owned by communities and workers, craft a just transition for labor, restore ecosystems, and repair the colonial wounds through restitution, participation, and true transparency. Let public funds flow toward regenerative projects that heal soils, waters, climates, and cultures. Let debt be realigned to serve systemic reform—public health, climate justice, affordable housing, education, and sustainable mobility—so that growth is not a sprint at the expense of kinship with the land, but a slow, courageous harmony with the beings who share this Earth.

If we listen deeply, the numbers become a chorus urging transformation: not merely to tweak policy, but to reweave the fabric of our economy into one that honors Mother Earth, honors the labor and wisdom of communities harmed by extractive histories, and honors the generational trust we owe to every future being. In that healing, the economy can finally be a balm rather than a blade.