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The Federal Government is responding to criticism of the crisis management these days with the same answer over and over again.
Germany got through the pandemic comparatively well, other nations are in a much worse economic position.
The self-diagnosis may be correct for the first part of the corona crisis, but this obviously no longer applies to the second stage of the pandemic, which is about arming the country for the future.
The relative weakness of Germany in dealing with the crisis can no longer be denied.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now issued the federal government with a very bad economic interim report.
While the IMF experts have significantly raised their growth forecasts for most countries in their spring study, they are not particularly optimistic for Germany this year.
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They expect gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by a meager 3.6 percent in 2021.
That is 0.1 percentage points more than the IMF economists had predicted three months ago.
However, when it comes to economic dynamism, this puts Germany at the bottom of the list among the major economies.
For the USA, the GDP forecasts were raised by 1.3 percentage points, for Italy by 1.2 percentage points, for India by one percentage point and for China and France by 0.3 percentage points.
Source: WORLD infographic
It looks poor for Germany not only in terms of dynamics.
Even with the sheer growth rate of 3.6 percent, Germany is in the lower ranks in the flagship report of the IMF.
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Only Japan, with a plus of 3.3 percent, do not expect even less growth for this year.
Berlin should note that the GDP slump in the corona year in this country, with a minus of 4.9 percent, was more moderate than in other economies.
But with a view to Russia or the USA, the IMF figures do not provide any evidence for this argumentation either.
On the contrary: The US economy only shrank by 3.5 percent last year and is still expected to expand 6.4 percent this year, according to the IMF.
Even if the experts at the Monetary Fund don't explicitly address it - Germany gets the receipt for political mismanagement.
In its analysis, the IMF prefers to speak diplomatically of dangerously diverging economies because vaccination progress is not advancing at the same pace in all countries and politicians are reacting differently to the crisis.
Source: WORLD infographic
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In fact, Germany is well behind other countries in vaccination progress, especially the UK.
The IMF experts believe the British economy will grow by 5.3 percent, 0.8 percentage points more than in the January forecast.
Other experts are even more pessimistic for Germany than the IMF economists.
The average of the forecasts of various banks locates the German GDP plus in 2021 only at 3.35 percent, as a survey by the financial agency Bloomberg shows.
Especially the comparison between Germany, the largest economy in Europe, and the USA, the largest economy in the world, reveals the whole German debacle.
At the beginning of the year, the forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg expected GDP growth of four percent for both Germany and the USA.
Source: WORLD infographic
In the meantime, a massive growth gap has opened up, as the consensus expects just under six percent for the USA and just 3.35 percent for Germany.
This is all the more surprising as not only the important German export partner America should grow strongly, but also China.
For the German export industry, that should actually be a stimulus of its own.