GERMANY’S constitutional debt brake has led to chronic underinvestment, so Friedrich Merz’s move to exempt both a €500bn ($539bn) infrastructure fund and defence expenditure over 1% of GDP is good news. But the looser purse strings of Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting have emboldened the parties in his expected coalition to offer goodies to voters. One is likely to be an expansion of the Mütterrente (”mothers’ pension”), a benefit to compensate parents for years spent raising children rather than working. It is almost exclusively claimed by women.