Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Supply chain woes are particularly bad in Britain because of a short supply of truck drivers.

Our correspondent hitches a ride, finding a grueling, tedious, precarious profession, and one lorry driver who wouldn't do anything else.

And the American state of Maine has a new law on the books enshrining the right to food.

It's intended to help with high levels of food insecurity,

but a vague statute letting anyone be a farmer has some troubling implications.

First up, though,

After two months of quiet negotiation, Germany has built a governing coalition.

The ampel state. SPD traffic light is on, said the next chancellor, Oloff Schultz, who will take over from Angela Merkel next month.

His Social Democrats' Party color of red will be joined by the Free Democrats, yellow, and the

Green Party.

Gone from this traffic light government are the Christian Democratic Union, the party of

Mrs. Merkel, marking a swift shift in government from center-right to center-left.

Mr. Schultz successfully pitched himself as the continuity candidate,

but some big changes are already baked into the coalition agreement,

from fiscal matters to social ones.

What was expected to be a really rough and unpredictable period of coalition negotiations

after the election actually seems to have proceeded pretty smoothly.

Tom Nuttall is the economist's Berlin Bureau Chief.

I think there is a sort of a sense that after 16 years of conservative rule under

Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, there was a lot of unfinished business in Germany on

everything from digitalizing

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