Germany’s new deregulation chief vows to be more subtle than Elon Musk

Germany’s new deregulation tsar has pledged to be more subtle than his former US counterpart Elon Musk, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) wreaked havoc slashing jobs and shutting down entire state-funded programmes.

“In a professional toolkit there isn’t just one chainsaw or a massive sledgehammer,” said Karsten Wildberger in his temporary office overlooking Berlin’s Tiergarten. “There are different instruments, from a screwdriver to a small hammer.”

The 56-year-old former corporate executive, who heads the newly created ministry for state modernisation and digitisation, may need all those instruments to bring his country’s bureaucracy — still more reliant on hard copies and fax machines than other nations — into the 21st century.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made cutting red tape a cornerstone of his plan to revive the Eurozone’s largest economy. Simplifying the thicket of regulations and digitising public services have featured in almost every one of his speeches and often included Wildberger’s name.

At stake is Germany’s ability to deploy more than €1tn swiftly to rebuild its armed forces and modernise ageing infrastructure after years of neglect. Europe’s competitiveness is also on the line, with former ECB president Mario Draghi warning in a landmark report last year that excessive regulations and overlapping barriers have strangled growth.

Previous governments have repeatedly promised to cut red tape — only to fail against Germany’s multi-layered federal and regional system.

Merz is also hoping to extract budget savings from the effort: €26bn a year by 2029, according to a draft plan seen by the Financial Times. By comparison, his predecessors only aimed for single-digit billions in annual savings from cutting red tape. The blueprint envisages trimming the federal and parliamentary civil service by 8 per cent.

Merz is planning to devote a cabinet meeting this autumn to red-tape reduction. Wildberger has been gathering proposals from each minister and promises something “meaty”.

“Europe over the last 20 years has built more and more complexity, and we in Germany have not just taken it, but actually have gold-plated it in some ways and have even increased it,” Wildberger said. “We make it actually very hard for companies to innovate.”

He said job cuts were inevitable in an ageing society already facing a shortage of skilled labour. “We will need it because we won’t find the people. Plus we must save costs in that process.”

An MBA graduate who left his job as chief executive of German electronics retailer Ceconomy to take up the new post in Merz’s government, Wildberger disputed that Germany was stuck in the analogue age — even though surveys show that many companies still use fax machines and Germans still use cash for half of their day-to-day payments.

Legislation also needs to catch up, as current German rules still classify faxes as official documents, while emails and text messages do not qualify in all cases.

“I have not seen any fax machine here. I don’t know when I last used one,” he said. “The question from a state perspective is: are we as digital as many of our citizens? I think there is a gap.”

Germans would rapidly adopt the digital wallet — the flagship app he is developing to give citizens digital access to public services — he said.

Wildberger traced Germany’s digitisation lag to its industrial tradition.

“Many of those industries are based on optimisation, having a very clear, well-oiled process, Germans are very good at this,” he said. “A big change in the digital world is that you’re never finished. It’s a world of constant change . . . a paradigm shift.”

Wildberger argued that Germany’s strict data protection laws, shaped by memories of the Nazi regime and the Stasi secret police in East Germany, are stifling innovation.

“I do question if the burden we often put on companies, on which data to use, is actually the right one,” he said. “We need values. I take them very seriously, but the approach we take is not good.”

His critique extends to Brussels, where he believes the new regulatory drive on artificial intelligence to be misguided.

“We regulate before the market is there. We need to develop,” he said, adding: “Sometimes it’s better to pause and think again because things have changed.”

On social media, however, Wildberger said he would support restrictions to protect teenagers’ mental health.

In Berlin political circles, scepticism runs deep about Wildberger’s ability to navigate the cut-throat world of coalition politics and overcome resistance in Germany’s 16 federal states — all the while building his own bureaucracy. He insists all his 600-strong staff will be drawn from other ministries and be cost neutral.

Some already bet he will be the first minister to quit. But Wildberger is undeterred.

“I’m not a politician,” he said, “but I have always been a political person. You can only change something when you’re inside the system.”

Four months into the job, he said: “Execution is everything. But at the same time you have to do it in a way that’s compatible with the system.”
 

Anne-Sylvaine Chassany
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Quelle: Financial Times