Mark Steyn is quite depressing writing about the chances for any sort of intelligent and necessary reform in Germany.

Back in the summer, I was reprimanded by a couple of Euro-grandees for my gloomy assessment of the Continent. Just you wait, they chided me; Mrs Merkel was "Germany's Thatcher" and this chap Sarkozy was "France's Reagan" and in a year's time the entire political scene would be transformed. I couldn't see it myself. Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan were certainly powerful personalities, but 25 years ago they also had electorates who accepted that the status quo was exhausted and unsustainable. The Germans are nowhere near that point.

In fact, insofar as there's been any trend in recent regional and European elections, it's that voters were punishing Mr Schröder's party even for the very modest reforms to which he was committed: they're not at the Thatcher stage, they're more like those council workers who reacted to Jim Callaghan's call for a limit of five per cent pay increases by demanding 40 per cent. According to recent polls, 70 per cent of Germans want no further cuts in the welfare state and prefer increasing taxation on the very rich. In April, only 45 per cent of Germans agreed that competition is good for economic growth and employment.

In other words, things are going to have to get a lot worse before German voters will seriously consider radical change. And the question then is whether the Christian Democrats will be the radical change they consider: as Sunday's results in east Germany indicate, it's as likely if not more so to be ex-Commies or neo-Nazis or some other opportunist fringe party. The longer European countries postpone the "painful" reforms, the more painful they're going to be.

I sure hope that Americans don't make the terrible mistake of becoming more and more like these failing European countries because it takes a very long time for a country to be so destroyed economically that the people are willing to accept some cut back in the government's social spending. It is very discouraging to see thse countries selfishly embrace their own economic paralysis.