German government's performance gets good marks

How does that go together? In a poll taken by DeutschlandTrend just two weeks ago, only 19% of respondents said they are satisfied with the federal government of center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP). But in a study published this week, the ruling coalition, which has been in office since December 2021, is rated as doing a good job overall.

This initially appears to be a glaring contradiction, which is quickly resolved on closer inspection: The study by the private Bertelsmann Foundation is an analysis of how much of the original coalition agreement — and the election promises it contained — have actually been implemented. The findings were supplemented by a representative survey by pollster Allensbach, who conducted face-to-face interviews with 1,011 eligible voters above the age of 16 across Germany.

Researchers scrutinized all the 453 major and minor promises the federal government made two years ago and assessed what has become of them so far. According to the study, almost two-thirds of the coalition's promises have either been fully implemented or are at least underway.

More money for children, revamped citizenship law

They include big ones such as reforming the social benefits system to combat child poverty where a compromise was reached recently, but also the reform of the citizenship law to enable people to obtain a German passport more quickly.

These and other contentious measures were agreed upon only after heated and public arguments between the coalition partners. This disagreements shaped the government's image in large parts of the population, triggering growing dissatisfaction with the government.

Bertelsmann researcher and economist Robert Vehrkamp summed up the findings: "It's a very promising mid-term review overall but overshadowed by very public disputes and many unresolved issues," he said.

Grand ambitions

The researchers point out that the coalition agreement is extremely ambitious. It contains many promises — 50% more than were made by the previous government of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"The large number of promises reflects the complexity of the cross-camp coalition of three programmatically independent parties, and it also shows how ambitious they were when they set out," said researcher Theres Matthiess from Trier University, which collaborated with the Bertelsmann Foundation to produce the report.

But public perception of the government is not favorable: Only 12% of those polled for this study said they believe that "all, almost all or a large part" of the initial plans will actually be implemented, while 43% said they expected only "a small part or hardly any" would be implemented.

No tolerance for compromise

To improve its standing among voters, the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz needs a fresh start in terms of internal cooperation and self-promotion, says political analyst Wolfgang Schröder of the Berlin think tank Das Progressive Zentrum, which was also involved in the Bertelsmann Study.

"The publicly staged coalition disputes lead people to underestimate the government's actual performance," Schröder explained.

The study suggests that the current government faces the same criticism as all political alliances in Germany: "A major challenge for all coalition governments and parties in Germany remains the voters' low frustration tolerance and lack of willingness to compromise," researchers Vehrkamp and Matthiess concluded.

Some 85% of those polled considered it "very important or important" that the parties implement the goals and plans stated in their election programs. Only 40% conceded that there could also be "acceptable reasons" for not keeping election promises. And only a third of these saw the need for compromise as an acceptable reason for possibly not keeping promises.

"It seems that many people see the parliamentary form of government, which is based on and dependent on compromise, as a betrayal of the principles and ideals of the parties," the researchers concluded.

This article was originally written in German.

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