THESE are political times. American democracy produces more drama in a week than it used to in a year. In France the forces of globalism and nationalism are locked in combat. In Britain nation-changing votes have become annual events. Brenda, a Bristol pensioner interviewed by the BBC in April, spoke for millions on learning of the early general election: “You’re jokin’! There’s too much politics going on!”

Germany is different. It goes to the polls on September 24th, but of politics red in tooth and claw there is little evidence. It is a country calm and comfortable, closer in spirit to Brenda than to Wagner. Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) are coasting to victory on an inoffensive manifesto offering something for everyone. Martin Schulz, her Social Democratic (SPD) rival, has a tough choice: be confrontational and risk losing voters to Mrs Merkel’s big tent, or echo her soothing overtures, leaving voters with little reason to pick him over her.

At the moment Mr Schulz seems to be combining the worst of both options. His bids to draw the chancellor into combat, for example by claiming that Germany is ill-prepared for future refugee crises, make him look panicky while underlining her Zen-like confidence. At the same time both parties’ posters and slogans are determinedly bland. The CDU calls “for a Germany in which we live well and happily”. The SPD proclaims that “the future needs new ideas and someone to implement them”. The Green party and the liberal FDP have been a bit more stimulating, but a Schlafwahlkampf, or “sleep election campaign”, looms.

In a sense, this is to Germany’s credit. With the exception of the chaotic nationalists in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, German politicians and journalists are less prone to emotionalising politics and manufacturing conflict than those in other countries. Mrs Merkel is a consummate difference-splitter who for eight of her 12 years as chancellor has governed comfortably with the SPD. With some minor differences of emphasis, she and Mr Schulz share the same worldview: internationalist, business-friendly and social democratic. The country is stable and prosperous, a land of whirring factories, sleek trains and bustling lakeside beer gardens. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

But that would be a mistake. In the long term, Germany faces enormous challenges, ones which will force its leaders to make difficult and divisive choices. “The next three or four years will be the most demanding since reunification,” predicts Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Take geopolitics. Germany may be largely happy with the structure of the European Union, but others are not. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants to deepen the integration of the euro zone in ways that Germans see as reaching into their pockets. America is insisting that German defence spending rise from 1.2% to 2% of GDP. German citizens, meanwhile, seem hesitant even to endorse their existing military obligations, such as their deployment in Lithuania. In May just 40% told the Pew Research Centre that they would back using military force to defend a NATO ally in a serious conflict with Russia.

Economic shifts will also be wrenching. The mighty German car industry is plagued by cartelism. It will pay a high price for its ill-advised gamble on diesel engines and it faces further disruption from the dash towards electrification and self-driving vehicles. The country’s low investment rate and high energy costs have hurt its rankings on digital and infrastructural competitiveness. That trend is compounded by a conservative attitude to certain kinds of new technologies. Germans are even more hostile than the French to a free-trade treaty with America and to big-data giants like Google. In another backwards-looking move, Mrs Merkel’s government decided to cut the retirement age. All told, says Stephan Richter, a pundit, Germany’s “anaesthetic” political class has not used the country’s golden decade to equip it for the future: “past performance is no indication of future success.”

The fabric of German society is also in flux. The work of integrating the 1.2m refugees who arrived during 2015 and 2016 is still at an early stage. Yet the country is not really debating how it should go about the job. The left avoids the subject, while the right proposes simply to stamp a traditional German identity on the newcomers. Few people are hashing out a more realistic vision for a hybrid, melting-pot form of Germanness. Meanwhile, as German society has grown more fluid and international, it has become harder to police. Recent terror attacks in Berlin and Hamburg, both committed by migrants who should have been deported but slipped through gaps in the system, have exposed serious security failings. That poses urgent questions in a country that is, for historical reasons, neuralgic about state surveillance.

The election season proper will not begin until late August. But current signs—party manifestos, early rallies and anodyne television interviews with politicians—suggest that Germany’s sleepy campaign will leave most of these big issues unattended.

Time to flush the Ambien

To find this worrying is not to belittle the success and stability of Germany today. But the dramas of 2015, including the rise of the AfD, show that deep political insecurities lie below the surface, and that anger can erupt quickly. “The 1,000 most influential people in [Berlin] know there’s a tough time ahead; they need to communicate that to voters,” argues Mr Lochocki. Christian Ude, a former SPD mayor of Munich, goes further, warning in a new book that the “flight from politics” by the mainstream abandons terrain to the political extremes.

With much of the world riven by political strife, it may sound odd to plead for more of it in one of the few countries that has remained placid. But Mr Ude is right. That Germany is doing well is not a reason to avoid a little discord. Quite the opposite: it is a window in which to embrace it constructively.