From today's Wall Street Journal (page A12 in the print edition):

The German ruling party's expected loss in a big regional election Sunday could further slow, or even roll back, economic restructuring in the world's third-largest economy.

A loss in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's biggest state, with 18 million of the country's 82 million inhabitants, would underline the unpopularity of the Social Democrats and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder ahead of next year's national elections. The heavily industrial region has been the party's heartland for decades, and defeat would be akin to the U.S. Republican Party losing Texas a year before a presidential election.

This certainly doesn't sound encouraging:

With polls showing that jobs are voters' top concern by far, Mr. Schroeder and his colleagues have sought to place the blame for Germany's five million unemployed on companies that move their production abroad instead of hiring at home. For the past two months, the Social Democrats' chairman, Franz Müntefering, has launched broadsides against greedy corporations that lay off workers to please the stock market, and foreign corporate raiders whom he likened to "locusts."

Germany's de-emphasis of business-friendly initiatives comes as free-market strategies are falling out of fashion in much of Europe. French politicians have united to attack "Anglo-Saxon capitalism" characterized by low social protections as they campaign for or against adopting the EU's proposed constitution in a May 29 referendum. Italy's pro-market government, having largely failed to liberalize the Italian economy, is teetering amid a sharp recession...

"There is a high likelihood that the SPD will react to defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia with a big internal argument over Schroeder's reforms," says Oskar Niedermayer, professor of politics at the Free University of Berlin.

Since March 2003, Mr. Schroeder has pushed an overhaul of Germany's welfare systems and labor market, known as Agenda 2010, whose most controversial element is deep cuts to benefits for the long-term unemployed in an effort to press them back to work. While the overhaul hasn't gone far enough to address the German economy's structural problems, in the view of many economists, it went too far for the SPD's left wing and its traditional supporters in trade unions...

"Whether the SPD can sustain this anticapitalism theme for 1½ years is questionable, because citizens will tire of it," says Prof. Niedermayer. "But the big question is whether you can continue with reforms." Polls late last year showed voters were just beginning to accept the need for changes along the lines of Mr. Schroeder's Agenda 2010. "The mentality of the population was starting to change, but this may be stopped by the new anticapitalism discussion," Prof. Niedermayer says.

Maybe it would help to keep staring at this picture.