The traffic light coalition is setting the wrong incentives in economic policy – and is thus jeopardising the future of Germany as a business location. A commentary.
Berlin – It is as predictable as it is unbearable: while hundreds of thousands of VW employees fear for their future, German politics is exhausting itself with knee-jerk phrases. The traffic light coalition is to blame, says CSU leader Friedrich Merz, as if he had had nothing to do with the economic policy of the past decades. And SPD minister Hubertus Heil wants to keep every VW factory, even though the unconditional adherence to untenable economic vested interests is one of the reasons for the misery.
Germany cannot limit itself to automotive and mechanical engineering
Everyone has made a lot of mistakes: it is almost impossible to list the wrong business decisions and the wrong economic policy decisions. At the core of it is the false belief that Germany could remain at the top of the world economy by concentrating on automobile and mechanical engineering. But the core value creation there also takes place in areas that we have unfortunately largely abandoned: electronics, software, artificial intelligence are just examples. By relying on what has been tried and tested, we have hindered rather than encouraged the establishment of new companies.
Many well-educated young people in Germany have plenty of promising ideas and entrepreneurial ambition. With them, the country could have products and services at its disposal that would secure the future for all of us. But most of them are cut off far too early. Not because they have failed, but because they could fail. Changing that would cost less than keeping dinosaur conglomerates alive. Looking across the Atlantic would help. None of the most important companies in the USA today would have survived under German conditionsHere we should pool all our strengths in a collective learning process instead of wasting them by looking back in anger at everyone else.
#Politics #crisis #unbearable #reflexes
