#29: How broken is Germany?
This week, I interviewed Chris Reiter, the co-author of Broken Republik
Berlin-based journalist Chris Reiter is co-author of the 2025 book Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany’s Descent into Crisis, which he penned with fellow journalist Will Wilkes.
A year later, a paperback edition has come out, with a new section on Merz’s first year as chancellor. I wanted to hear Chris’ perspective on the state of Germany in spring 2026, when only 32% of Germans want the CDU/CSU-SPD coalition to continue and the economy remains stagnant.
I found his big-picture view of German politics and society refreshing, brutally honest as well as deeply worrying.
Maurice
Broken Republik was published about a year ago. How broken is Germany now?
I would say it’s more broken. The pace of decline has been probably more alarming than I would have thought a year ago. The failure of the traffic light coalition seemed like it was a function of the three-party instability and uncertainty. Since then there was the idea that a return to a centrist government would at least stabilise the ship to a degree, so it’s been surprising how unstable the Merz coalition has been, after just a year in power.
How do you explain that?
I think both of the parties haven’t entirely recognised the gravity of the situation and both of the parties see themselves still in their role of the guarantor of stability of the German economy. They have this blind spot. They are unable to look past the party platform and actually see what’s going on in society and how to talk past the party into the people. You see that every day with Merz and his communication. Increasingly, it seems like they have tunnel vision in how they see the world and how they see Germany.
What are they not seeing?
I think the basic social contract that has kept Germany afloat for so long has deteriorated to the point of insult for a lot of people and there needs to be a rethink of how Germany can move forward in the reality that exists for Germany today. That reality is that the US security umbrella is gone. China is taking away a lot of markets, industry and innovation that Germany used to dominate and I don’t think there’s been that fundamental reset of Germany’s place in the world and how to promote a new Germany into the future. There's still a focus on preserving the Germany that has been successful for the last 70-odd years.
In Broken Republik you write that the Federal Republic defined its identity in terms of economic success or “prosperity for all” (Wohlstand für Alle) and now that’s crumbling. They’re scrambling to get back to that but it’s not happening.
They're paying lip service to that idea of Wohlstand für Alle, shared prosperity, but they haven't really addressed the fact that it's not working. You see that in the level of wealth inequality in Germany, the worst in Europe. The level of inequality is problematic and is undermining social solidarity. They constantly tell the working class that they have to work harder and longer, and say with pensions “we’ll see”, and that you'll probably be serving in the military and maybe have to fight Russia or maybe even the US in the future, without promising something in between. To rebuild a sense of solidarity implies that you have to tax the wealthy. You have to cross that bridge and the CDU is not willing to go there. Instead it’s putting pressure on the working class. Merz spoke at the DGB (trade union confederation) and said everybody’s going to have to make sacrifices but the “everybody” that he’s talking about feels like the working class and that’s the majority of the population. So he doesn’t connect those dots. Do you really mean everybody or do you mean the working class? On the other side, you have the SPD which is supposed to be for the working class but has kind of abandoned that field and has lost credibility in that field. They’re trying to reclaim that but a lot of blue colour people have shifted to the AfD and far right because the system isn’t working for them.
How is it not working for them?
The idea of Wohlstand für Alle has become a bit of a cruel joke. They see how their livelihoods are under threat, how jobs are not as secure as they used to be, and even if you have a job, the ability to find affordable housing is compromised. There’s limited upward mobility. The trade-off in Germany for the lack of upward mobility was supposed to be stability but now you don't have upward mobility and opportunity and you don't have stability either. That’s a toxic brew. There hasn’t been a real dialogue within the mainstream that recognises that.
The burden of taxes and social security contributions for working and middle class people is one of the highest in the world. But the wealthy can opt out of public health and pension payments. How do you see the social security system developing?
Civil servants and independent entrepreneurs don’t pay into the pension system. But at the same time there is a dialogue around social services that there will be less to go around and Germany can’t afford it like it used to. It seems incredibly unfair that there are people who are unwilling to contribute, even if it’s a marginal amount at the end of the day.
Especially working class people contribute a lot of their income to the state and the state has a lot of responsibility but is providing very little and people see that they will be getting less over time. So if you don’t reset the narrative, if you don’t encourage people and show them that they can get more, that society can be more flexible, that they can maybe have a side hustle and actually keep most of that income, to encourage a bit of entrepreneurial spirit instead of this society that is constantly looking towards the state. The state itself has created this problem, this cradle-to-grave idea…
What the Germans call Staatsgläubigkeit, belief in the state…
Merz sometimes makes a fair argument that the state can’t take over every risk. But at the same time it feels like they do take over every risk for certain segments of the economy, especially big companies, so it’s hard for an average German to feel like they have a stake in the system and so the credibility and legitimacy of the system is under threat and that’s the reality of what I think Germany’s facing these days.
How about the demographic issue? The birth rate is plummeting. It seems like we’re woefully underprepared for what’s coming when the baby boomers retire.
That’s why there’s this feeling of tension. This is just around the corner. The problem is that there’s been decades to prepare for this and now it’s just before Ladenschluss — closing time — and these huge pension bills are coming and along with the pension bills is the healthcare cost because older people need to go to the doctor more and deserve care. The anti-immigration sentiment that has propelled the AfD and that the CDU has also amplified doesn’t create incentives for people who want to come here. Recently they’ve talked about sending 80% of Syrians back, which is bad for the healthcare system because a lot of them work in healthcare but also in nursing homes.
Trying to be somewhat positive, there’s still a lot of substance in Germany. But they should let go of the reins, encourage as much entrepreneurship as they can. Because protecting the Mittelstand, which were the startups of the post-war period or the industrial period, doesn’t really help you create new opportunity for people. There is substance there and Germany can do a better job leveraging that.
One of the things that is very little discussed in the broader national debate is education. The educational system has been a bit of a dumpster fire or at least sub par for 20 years or longer. There’s been little progress on that front. So you’re undermining your own human resources potential by not giving kids the education they need to face the world. An example I like to give is that when I was going to school in suburban Chicago I was learning coding before we had personal computers or mobile phones. Then in the 90s I was able to write HTML code for a company I was working for. But my son who’s been raised with a smartphone, a supercomputer in his pocket effectively, has not been taught that and the only sort of digital policy at school is about when they can use phones and when they can’t. Those are the limitations on the debate.
I think there is a tendency in Germany to not want to have the big broad debate about where we are. There’s a focus on trimming things here, cutting some costs there. It’s just dealing with things on the margins.
“Unfortunately, the focus in Germany is too much on not getting things wrong — making the perfect the enemy of the good.”
Something expats are always talking about —- and Germans as well at this point — is excessive bureaucracy and its twin sister, the slow pace of digitisation of the state. Have you seen any hopeful signs?
There have been some marginal improvements. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they are allowed to file a building permit digitally and that created jubilation but it’s really going too slow. One of the things that at least Merz did is finally create a digital ministry but you’ve seen very little from that so far and unfortunately, the focus in Germany is too much on not getting things wrong — making the perfect the enemy of the good. The focus on digital privacy and controlling your information and stuff like that has a role to play but there’s also a need for speed and we’re not seeing that. It’s not moving fast enough.
It’s still too complicated to start a business. It’s too complicated to get a new ID, to change your residency and things like that. At least they’ve acknowledged the problems and put some organisational weight behind it but it’s still slow.
I think Germany could do something to send signals, to focus on one area that might not move the needle entirely but something where people can feel like the state is working for them in some way. There’s so much frustration that you just feel if there’s any positive spark people will grab onto it. Housing is such a pain point for so many people, so just start a building programme, anything, mini-houses, something like that. They have come up with type E (simplified building standard) but they haven't done anything with it yet so I think they need to do some marketing.
Or maybe just more straightforward, simple communication. “This is our vision and this is how we’re going to get there.”
Yeah, I think one of the biggest failures of that is the infrastructure fund. We’ve all known for decades that Germany’s infrastructure has been slowly corroding so it makes sense to do the infrastructure fund. It was €500 billion and infrastructure doesn’t just happen overnight. But you have to do something that people feel. €500 billion is a huge number. It’s so much that an average person cannot comprehend it. But you can comprehend that it has to be paid back. That €500 billion is basically a moonshot, a one-off, generational project that should have a goal in mind like the Apollo mission or something where you can say, okay, at the end of it you’re going to have a local bus run every 10 minutes or we’re going to have the best infrastructure in the world or it’s going to be safer or whatever. But they didn’t really have the courage to put some goals behind it and then it just ends up going into regular projects, like an Autobahn in Berlin that has been in planning for 20-30 years. Nobody can really understand why they’re still building inner city Autobahns when inner city transit has moved on to something else.
Isn’t one of the problems that we end up with these unworkable coalitions which don’t have a lot of voter support? They barely scraped by the 50% mark and then they don’t even agree because of the firewall to the AfD. Do you see that in the next year or so collapsing and maybe the CDU joining forces with the AfD?
Yes, I see that happening, at least in the state elections in the fall. In Sachsen-Anhalt and other state elections it’s going to be impossible to form a coalition without the AfD and I think that the problem is that if you try to form some kind of unworkable coalition in a state legislature that would be from the Left to the CDU to the SPD to maybe even the FDP, it’s this multi-headed monster that’s not going to get anything done and the problem with that is that you feed and amplify the AfD narrative that the mainstream parties and the establishment are really just about protecting their own power and not listening to the will of the people.
So if you reject the votes of, in some cases, 40% or more of the electorate then you are ignoring the will of the people. If they’ve been voted in free and fair elections and then you say, well no we’ll just ignore them because we have this policy, that’s problematic and it ends up strengthening the AfD even if they don’t get into the government immediately in the East. So you will strengthen them over time because you create this unworkable government that can’t get stuff done, can’t solve problems because they’re constantly bickering with one another. And then the AfD gets an absolute majority.
My concern on the national level is that Merz is forced aside because a new election would be disastrous for either the CDU or the SPD. The CDU could carry on effectively in a coalition with the AfD, whether it is a tolerated minority government or a tacit sort of collaboration. They can maybe maintain the window dressing of the firewall but it’s de facto gone and the CDU and AfD effectively rule together. You could see somebody like Jens Spahn taking on that mantle. That’s been the trajectory and if the CDU does poorly in these fall elections the knives could really come out in public: Merz can no longer maintain any semblance of authority and he has to step down in order to avoid a disastrous snap election so that you get some sort of minority government with the tacit acceptance of the AfD.
Which is uncharted territory for post-war Germany…
Yeah, then the CDU would effectively hand the AfD the club to beat them with because then, if a minority government didn’t work they could say the CDU are the problem so I think it could be a really poisoned collaboration. It would be unprecedented, but there’s been a lot that was unprecedented. Even Merz’s appointment: He wasn’t voted in in the first round which was unprecedented and showed already the sense of tension and volatility early on. Unfortunately, he hasn’t stabilised the ship. I wish there was a bit more calm because I think there’d be a possibility for Germany to turn things around but when you go from instability to instability, it’s hard to create momentum.
It’s feels like Weimar 2.0.
Kaja Hoyer just put out a book on Weimar and the subtitle is “Life on the edge of catastrophe” and I joked that my book is called Broken Republik and it’s essentially “Germany on the edge of catastrophe” — just right now. And that’s what we write about in the book: Because there’s not this robust sense of identity, there’s so much unresolved trauma and the support that economic prosperity gives to national identity is now under threat, it creates this risk of falling harder and faster than maybe some other countries. I wish there was a better prognosis right now.
Do you offer a best-case scenario for Germany in your book?
I think the prospects that we offer up to brighten the mood a bit — I feel like it’s almost too late for that. The problem is really on the political level. Who could come in and implement that? What political party or authority would be able to get the mandate to make that happen? At least from the progressive side or democratic mainstream, it’s hard to see that. There was that window when the Greens could have mustered that positive, forward-looking agenda but that’s fallen apart. The risk is that Germany has to go through this period of darkness before someone emerges who can mobilise people and come up with a vision towards the light. It doesn’t have to be so bleak but the problem really is leadership, the political class being able to come up with a vision of what the Germany of the future is going to look like.
Thanks to Chris for the chat. Here’s the link to Broken Republik again — and thank you for reading another issue of Update Germany.
Maurice
P.S. If you’re in Berlin, I’ll be hosting another 20% Berlin News Quiz on Wednesday, May 20. TICKETS.
What else happened this week?
🇺🇸 Merz wouldn’t advise his children to live in the US
🛂 Abdallah A., a nonperson because of his Instagram posts
🍫 Milka guilty of chocolate shrinkflation
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Loved the post. Thank you again for doing this work!
I think many nails have been hit on the head in this post.
For me it’s the broken social contract. All you see is your tax dollars disappear trying to prop up a state that fails to serve its people.
Germany needs to finally shed its authoritarian past and start listening to what people want instead of telling them what they should want and HOW they should want it. Put the service back in civil service; not allow them to act like entitled, unfireable state goons whose job it is to protect outdated rules instead of actively being involved in reforming processes and reporting on the types of usage and access problems people struggle with and trying their best to enable citizens to realize their dreams. (A cornerstone idea of having freedom).
Encouraging entrepreneurs is a nice idea but if they can’t even reform the _Notartermin_ bottleneck then I don’t know why one would really want to be an entrepreneur in a country that punishes failure.
A great and informative read, thank you. Adding the book to my reading list asap!