The Angry Republic.(Germany and public opinion of Gerhard Schroder)

"Schroder is stupid." That's how a Berlin daily, Die Welt, sums up German public opinion. A more intellectual--and vicious--insult these days is to compare Chancellor Gerhard Schroder to Heinrich Bruning, the hapless Weimar-era chancellor whose incompetent handling of the Great Depression helped bring on Adolf Hitler.

Ouch. Never has a postwar German leader experienced such a sharp reversal of political fortunes--or met such a wave of public and editorial invective. Just two months ago, Schroder and his Social Democrats celebrated their narrow re-election. Today, half the people who voted for him wish they hadn't. Were the election held again, the opposition Christian Democrats would get 50 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats 28.

Germans see plenty of reasons to be angry. After pledging during the campaign not to raise taxes, Schroder's government just slapped citizens and businesses with up to [currency]23 billion in new levies, effective Jan. 1. Instead of passing a tediously negotiated "breakthrough" compromise to loosen Germany's job-killing labor regulations, Schroder bowed to the unions and defanged the law of its most potent measures. Thanks to these "fixes," say economists, the new law will now likely destroy more jobs than it creates. Schroder also reneged on a promise to finally start reforming Germany's teetering social-security system. Instead, he just hiked premiums by [currency]1.3 billion. Tacked onto wages, they'll make the country's workers even more expensive--already the costliest in the world.

With Germany verging on recession, Schroder's flip-flops have made a terrible national mood even worse. "What more has to happen before the government announces a fundamental reform instead of just another tax increase?" fumes Helmut Panke, CEO of Munich-based carmaker BMW. Here's the dilemma: Germany's problems are known in perfect clarity, as are the solutions. Yet again, another new government has utterly failed to deal with them effectively. More and more Germans have begun asking whether their country can, in fact, reform at all. If not, the prospect is upsetting indeed: withering prosperity, continuing economic decline, ultimately social disorder.

Even the most staid newspapers and magazines are thus almost hysterical with rage. The country needs a revolution, the editor of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, Frank Schirrmacher, wrote in a seething editorial last week. On a recent cover, the liberal NEWSWEEKly Stern calls for a revolt of the young against Schroder and a generation of politicians that the magazine says has ruined them. TV talk shows are full of professors and scientists fulminating against the government. One such, the historian Arnulf Baring of the Free University of Berlin, goes so far as to suggest that the nation's economic calcification and political paralysis threatens to turn it into a "light" version of communist East Germany. His remedy: tax boycotts, demonstrations and street barricades.

Ordinary citizens aren't storming the Reichstag just yet. Instead, they've gone gaga over a viciously sarcastic rap-song parody of Schroder, boosting it to the top of the pop charts all but overnight. Called "The Tax Song," the tune portrays the chancellor as a rapacious tax collector. "All you nerds have money buried somewhere," raps Schroder sound-alike Elmar Brandt, "and I'll get ...