The coalition of Friedrich Merz’s CDU, its Bavarian sister party the CSU, and the center-left SPD pledged “a comprehensive rollback of bureaucracy” in their agreement last April. A new survey suggests citizens and businesses see little change.
A YouGov poll found 66% of respondents said administrative burdens had stayed the same since the government took office, while 22% reported an increase. In a related poll for the European Center for Digital Competitiveness at ESCP Business School in Berlin, only 4% of businesses believed bureaucracy had decreased and 8% were unsure.
Among managers, 63% said bureaucracy was unchanged, 31% reported an increase and just 4% saw a decline. About half of managers said they had delayed or canceled projects in the past year because of slow or complex administrative processes.
Respondents identified the greatest need for digital improvement in healthcare and local administrative offices, followed by tax services and construction approvals.
“People don’t want more announcements; they want the state to finally just work,” said Philip Meissner, founder of the Center for Digital Competitiveness at ESCP. The center’s co-founder Klaus Schweinsberg added the results show Merz has “clearly failed” on core competitiveness issues: digitization and cutting bureaucracy.
Edited by: Jenipher Camino Gonzalez
German foreign medical worker program mired in bureaucracy (embedded video)