If Germany is the heart of Europe, then it is currently the slow-beating heart of a well-fed businessman resting on his office couch after an ample lunch. For Europe’s sake, and for Germany’s own, that heart needs to beat a little faster.

It’s not that German elites don’t intellectually recognise the problems gathering all around them. Berlin, which is beginning to rival London as a thinktank hub, is pullulating with clever people who can tell you exactly why, faced with the challenges of Brexit, populism, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, climate change and AI – to name but a few – Europe needs more strategic autonomy, digital innovation and sustainable growth. What is missing is a sense of urgency and the ability to translate these abstract goals into dynamic policies that German voters will actually support. For now, Germany is effectively willing the ends but not the means.

Why this stasis? Because Germany has been doing quite nicely, thank you. It has not felt the pain that, one way or another, most other parts of the continent have experienced. Crisis, what crisis? Obviously, this is not true of everyone, but even those East Germans who have recently voted in shockingly large numbers for the far-right, xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland are not primarily complaining about their economic circumstances.

Beneath the surface of the country’s success story, there is a growing drumbeat of anxiety. Has it wasted the fat years?

Most Germans probably still view the long period of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship – a staggering 14 years on Friday – as a stable and good time for the country. The German economy has done well over this period. This is partly because it can draw on all the familiar German business strengths, and partly because the Merkel chancellorship has benefited from reforms of the labour market and welfare system introduced under the Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But it has also profited very significantly from external circumstances.

The post-1989 opening-up of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and their subsequent accession to the European single market gave a wonderful opportunity for German manufacturers to relocate production facilities just next door, using cheap skilled labour in a kind of Mitteleuropa 2.0. Not least, the euro has kept the German currency at a lower external exchange rate than it would otherwise have soared to (witness what happened to the Swiss franc). So the German export machine has powered ahead, generating eye-popping trade surpluses. And because the country has an evangelical protestant commitment to running a balanced budget – the totemic “black zero” – and a constitutionally anchored “debt brake”, it has healthy public finances that most democratic capitalist countries would die for.

‘Maybe Germany is missing out on the digital revolution, so its fabled car industry now looks distinctly old-fashioned compared with the self-drive electric cars being developed by the giants of Silicon Valley and China?’ Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA

Yet beneath the surface of this success story there is a growing drumbeat of anxiety. Maybe the country has wasted the fat years, not investing enough in its ageing infrastructure? Maybe it is missing out on the digital revolution, so its fabled car industry now looks distinctly old-fashioned compared with the self-drive electric cars being developed by the giants of Silicon Valley and China. (Tesla’s announcement that it will build a factory near Berlin is both a tribute to Germany and a frontal challenge to national champions such as Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen.) Maybe all that has been achieved over many decades will now be eroded thanks to immigration, Trump’s tariff war, populism and other uncertainties. The anxious leitmotif of popular sentiment, especially in the predominant western part of the country, is “let’s hang on to what we’ve got”.

So 30 years on from a peaceful revolution that opened the door to German unification, we have a defensive, conservative society underpinning a defensive, status quo power. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, impatiently wants to revolutionise Europe, giving the old continent Napoleonic strategic ambition, but Merkel’s Germany is not playing ball. As one adviser to Macron memorably put it to me: “Aristocrats don’t vote for revolution.” (If the Germans are the pre-1789 aristocrats in this analogy, does that make the French the sans-culottes?) German responses to Macron’s European initiatives have ranged from the lukewarm to the dismissive.

The politics match the economics and society. Germany is the only country I know where politicians actively strive to sound boring. This is part of a culture of responsibility, sobriety and moderation that embodies a conscious rejection of the wildness of German political behaviour between 1914 and 1945. The speeches can rapidly send one to sleep, but if the alternative is Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, I’ll settle for serious and boring.

For 10 of the last 14 years, Merkel has presided over grand coalition governments, bringing together the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats. This has given continuous stable government, but at a cost. Consensual centrism has not encouraged the robust political debate essential to a liberal democracy. Conservative Germans have long complained that “we have two social democratic parties”. This is a perfectly competent government for undemanding times, but with none of the ambition needed to face the giant challenges of today. Meanwhile, having both main parties in power together for so long has strengthened support for the extremes, on both left and right.

Everyone knows that this is the twilight of the Merkel era, but the Merkeldämmerung is taking longer than the most epic Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). Yet in a recent Politbarometer poll, more than two thirds of those asked said they want Merkel and her government to continue until the end of the current electoral term, in autumn 2021. Of course, it’s entirely up to the German people to decide who they want to govern them, but I would respectfully suggest that this is not in the best interest of either Germany or Europe.

Merkel and her Social Democrat vice chancellor, Olaf Scholz, have a cunning plan to outlive even Wagner’s gods. First they have marked their own homework, producing a half-term report on the grand coalition government that suggests it has done, on the whole, quite brilliantly. Second, they had a nice little row about pensions that ended – surprise! – with a constructive compromise. Now they aim to get support for continuity at their respective party conferences: the Christian Democrats at the end of this month, the Social Democrats early next month.

Fortunately, even German politics are not that predictable. Merkel and her putative successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, will face criticism from a rightwing challenger, Friedrich Merz. Scholz has to compete for the party leadership with a pair of contenders from the left. If, under Teuto-Corbynista leadership, the Social Democrats actually decided to leave the grand coalition, then a variety of possibilities would arise. Perhaps a Christian Democrat minority government? Or a “Jamaica” coalition of Christian Democrats (black), Free Democrats (yellow) and Greens (green). Or new elections, possibly leading to a black-green government.

Whatever happens, one thing seems to me clear: in Germany’s own long-term interest, and in Europe’s, it’s time for a change.

• Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist