{"id":3763,"date":"2026-04-11T14:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/3763\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T14:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:52:09","slug":"germany-survey-shows-little-progress-on-cutting-red-tape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/3763\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany: Survey shows little progress on cutting red tape"},"content":{"rendered":"

A survey published Saturday said two-thirds of Germans believe unnecessary bureaucracy<\/a> has remained the same since the current government took office. Some said administrative burdens were even worse, despite a promise made last year by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s incoming government<\/a> to slash red tape.<\/p>\n

The coalition of Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) agreed to “a comprehensive rollback of bureaucracy” in its agreement last April.<\/p>\n

What did the survey say?<\/p>\n

The poll, conducted by YouGov found 66% of citizens said administrative burdens had remained the same since the current government took office, while 22% reported an increase.<\/p>\n

Businesses reported limited improvement. Only 4% believed bureaucracy<\/a> had decreased, with 8% unsure in the poll conducted for the European Center for Digital Competitiveness at the ESCP Business School in Berlin.<\/p>\n

Among managers surveyed, 63% said bureaucracy had stayed the same, while 31% saw it increase and just 4% reported a decline. About half said they had delayed or canceled projects in the past year due to slow or complex administrative processes.<\/p>\n

Respondents said the greatest need for digital improvement is in healthcare and local administrative offices, followed by tax services and construction approvals.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

The center’s co-founder Klaus Schweinsberg said the survey results showed that the Merz had “clearly failed” on the core issues for competitiveness: digitization and cutting bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Edited by: Jenipher Camino Gonzalez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A survey published Saturday said two-thirds of Germans believe unnecessary bureaucracy has remained the same since the current…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3828,3816,3437,480,3830,393,5,3829],"class_list":{"0":"post-3763","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-administrative-burdens","9":"tag-bureaucracy","10":"tag-christian-social-union","11":"tag-christian-democratic-union","12":"tag-current-government","13":"tag-friedrich-merz","14":"tag-germany","15":"tag-incoming-government"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}