BERLIN (AFP) – German politicians make a lot of laws and regulations but on the campaign trail many rage against the country’s notorious bureaucracy, labelling it a monster that needs to be slayed.
Whatever else divides them, almost all candidates in the February 23 vote agree with the popular idea that Europe’s biggest economy needs to slash back its thicket of rules, often labelled a “jungle of paragraphs”.
Some want to take a chainsaw to it all, inspired by Argentina’s neoliberal President Javier Milei, even if their true intent at times may be to weaken troublesome labour or environmental standards.
Conservative poll frontrunner Friedrich Merz – who once famously argued a tax return should fit onto a coaster – vowed to go to war against the “bureaucracy monster”.
Merz and others want to free companies from national and European Union (EU) reporting obligations, especially the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, that they regard as headache-inducing as its German tongue twister name, the Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, in a controversial recent online chat to support Germany’s far-right AfD, claimed that the approval documents for his Tesla plant near Berlin amounted to an entire truckload of paper, each page stamped by hand.
At a recent Berlin protest called by business groups who demanded steps to revive the stagnating economy, property firm manager Urs Moeller, 44, fumed about being “suffocated” by red tape. “The accident insurance people keep inventing new procedures where they do nothing but send us a bill,” he told AFP.
“Taxes and bureaucracy are making it harder and harder to be efficient and pay attractive wages.” The problem is real, and there is a report to prove it.
The number of regulations has grown by 18 per cent in Germany since 2014, according to government figures.
Critics charge that the time workers spent doing paperwork is a serious problem for a struggling economy already battered by high energy costs and growing competition.
Time spent filling in forms cost the German economy EUR65 billion (USD67 billion), said the Normenkontrollrat, an independent body advising the government on regulation.
The Ifo economic institute, factoring in a series of indirect costs, puts the figure even higher – at a whopping EUR146 billion or 3.4 per cent of German economic output.
Digitisation is often touted as the answer – the Foreign Ministry this year was proud to announce it had finally moved visa applications online – but IT does not always prove to be the magic bullet.
Lutz Krause, who owns a construction company, said a new electronic invoicing system designed to help the government keep better track of receipts was causing paperwork to multiply.
