What a great country to live in.

The worst thing is, this is not an outlier. A lot of countries are equally mismanaged and also focus on electing the worst people to fix that situation (populists usually) while hating those who are trying to improve things because they don't want things to change.

but I still feel like the degree of political attention digitalization gets in Germany is bonkers.

That is probably because of two reasons.
First, Germany has a reputation for overboarding bureaucracy and a bloated administrative machinery in all parts of life. "Passierschein A38" isn't a running gag for nothing. Digitalization well done could trim this by a lot and make a lot of administrative errands more accessible to everyone.
Second, the term "digitalization" itself is a buzzword that can mean everything and nothing and everyone has their own conception of it, so you can easily demand more digitalization and have everyone on your side.

If every fax in Germany were, tomorrow, an email,

Here again, digitalization can mean everything and nothing. I am an IT person, this would not really be digitalization for me. There is a familiar quotation, „Wenn du einen Scheißprozess digitalisierst, hast du am Ende einen digitalen Scheißprozess“, meaning when you digitalize a bullshit process, you have a digital bullshit process. That's why to me and many of my colleagues it is important to always review any given process and see if you can't improve on the process itself.

Also, strange if it comes from the industry based on outdated technology. The fax is more digital than an internal combustion engine.

They are used to getting bailed out by the government, when they are about to fail. The automotive industry is now crying, that politics did not push them into electrical vehicles and that is why they overslept adapting to new technologies.

It is also internal consumptiom, which is dropping. The biggest reason for that are the liberals, who desperatly want to not make debt during a recession. This is especially stupid, since inflation means the German economy still has a lot of nominal growth. So debt to gdp is falling is likely to fall like crazy for Germany. In other words, the easy fix would be a large stimulus package and there are plenty of good ways of spending that money.

Is there a way to open a large version of this image?