Whereas women’s liberationists fifty years ago fought for the repeal of all abortion laws, the best that Planned Parenthood can muster today is a vision of regulated legalisation. Whereas the Wages for Housework committee said that ‘every miscarriage is a workplace accident’ insofar as every place is an alienated gestational workplace under capitalism, there is no guarantee that, on a twenty-first century women’s march, one will see a single placard about Medicare for All, or free universal 24/7 childcare, or paid parental leave.

Against the rolling eyes of the know-all cynic, we should retain shock at those litanies of iniquity capitalism throws up. That they provoke in us an appropriate, human, humane response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering. Who would we be not to hate this system, and its partisans?

So what role will, or can, Germany’s next government play in enabling the social and economic transformation so desperately needed to address the climate crisis? Above all, the Merkel era provided a bulwark against any sort of social-ecological transformation.

Ukrainian flags fly everywhere in Western capitals now – in London, government buildings in Whitehall have even hoisted them alongside the Union Jack – not because Ukrainians suffer (though they do, horrifically) but because their suffering makes sense within a story of European enlightenment, whose borders must be fortresses against the invading hordes.

We are, all of us, in denial about what awaits us in the Changes. Not just the conservatives. Liberals and social democrats deny as well; so too does the Left. Denial is repression, the putting away of an unpleasant idea. We deny because we are human. We repress. Repression and the return of the repressed are the same. What cannot be confronted converts into stranger commitments and violence.