Before the fall of the wall, the West German economy was set up as a ‘coordinated market economy’, the origins and dynamics of which could be understood in terms of complementarities between political and economic and social institutions. However, over the last 20 years, German capitalism has undergone a series of transformations. These institutional changes must be understood in the context of the long wave of reunification and that of the Economic and Monetary Union in Europe. They relate to synergy between exogenous factors, therefore, but also endogenous factors and political change, driven in particular by the ‘third track’ strategy implemented with the ‘Agenda 2010’ announced in March 2003. However, the relative successes of the German economy, at the heart of the crisis, now that of the euro area, are more due to the reactivation of the institutional complementarities specific to the industrial exporter, than to the economic diagnosis and policy underlying the “Agenda 2010” and the Hartz reforms. The latter will have made German society more unequal and, due to the failure of the strategy of the “new centre” of the SPD in Schröder, Chancellor Angela Merkel, will have led to a third term of office.