was himself a little surprised to be appointed to Chancellor ‘s new Cabinet. It all happened “rather suddenly,” the 55-year-old said as one of his first appearances, the formal “handover” at the office of his predecessor, Volker Witting.
Strictly speaking, Wildberger doesn’t really have a predecessor, because his Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernizaton is entirely new. Things are moving quickly: Officially an independent when appointed, the new minister became a member of Merz’s (CDU) last week. And yet, Wildberger’s powers are significant: Five ministries, plus the chancellor’s office, have all surrendered some of their purviews to be bundled together in his new department.
Essentially, anything that involve administering the state’s IT infrastructure now under Wildberger’s oversight — a man who until a fortnight ago earned his living by running Ceconomy, an international retail company that operates consumer electronics stores across Europe.
Germany’s DOGE?
What Wildberger’s job means in practice is yet to be seen, but the focus on efficiency and digitalization, and the minister’s perceived status as an interloper from the business world has led to comparisons with and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President ‘s second administration in the US.
Niklas Potrafke, director of the Center for Public Finance and Political Economy at the ifo economic institute in Munich, says that what Wildberger and Musk might have in common is the element of “disruption.” “I mean doing certain things in a different way, thinking in a completely new way,” he said. “And to really change or dismantle things that we know are critical — like administrative procedures. These are the positive aspects that we could bring here from the effect that Elon Musk has had.”
But Wildberger is unlikely to be willfully sacking government employees with impunity and gleefully swinging a chainsaw around the stage at a political rally any time soon. For one thing, his tone is a little less belligerent: “My goal is to create optimal conditions for Germany to grow as a competitive and innovative digital location,” Wildberger said in an official statement. “This requires a modern, efficient and citizen-oriented state and an administration that thinks and acts digitally.”
As Der Spiegel reported, Wildberger also said he would work with “respect, curiosity, determination, and teamplay” — plus, he added cryptically, a dash of “friendly tenacity.”
Niklas Potrafke, thinks the Musk comparisons are not really suitable. “Elon Musk is I think is a very unusual personality, and very flashy,” he told DW. “Wildberger isn’t nearly that flashy.”
There’s also a more germane difference: Musk is not officially part of the government, which means he’s not bound by the compromises of day-to-day administration. Also, unlike Musk, Wildberger will of course be subject to the ‘s rather stricter data privacy regulations.
But, like Musk, Wildberger certainly has a taste for radically stripping back regulations on business. “For every law, two must be repealed. Is that possible?” he said on Tuesday, in a speech at a meeting of the CDU-affiliated lobby group the Economic Council. And he already had two laws in mind that he believes are ripe for repeal: The supply chain law, designed to protect human rights and guard against the use of modern slavery in supply chains of multinationals, and the heating law, which is meant to make heating systems in new buildings more climate-friendly.
Regulation versus ‘disruption’
But Potrafke admits that putting business executives in government isn’t always a good thing: “A bad outcome would of course be if former businesspeople make policies, such as on regulation, that benefit their own sectors,” he said. “They can feather their nests, so to speak, because they know that they will one day leave politics and profit with their own companies.”
Wildberger’s powers are also hedged by Germany’s federal system, which means the state governments and local district authorities have a lot of power over their own public services.
“One of his big tasks will be to make alliances and find common ground with the states, because he cannot tell them what to do,” said Lena-Sophie Müller, head of Initiative D21, a digital society network that works both with the private sector and the government. “It’s not just: Does he have the power to rule, but can he be a good leader, can he create a Team Germany?”
Why Wildberger?
Chancellor Merz is not exactly breaking new ground by putting company managers into the Cabinet. In fact, it’s something of a German tradition, on both sides of the political divide: In 1998, the incoming Social Democrat Chancellor made Werner Müller, a board member of the energy giant RWE, his new economy minister — explicitly hoping to signal that his government would be more business-oriented.
But still, Wildberger’s appointment was a surprise to many — even among those who had been expecting Merz’s government to establish a Digitalization Ministry. “I believe everybody was surprised,” said Müller of Initiative D21. “I called a couple of people in my network, and I was like, ‘Do you know him?’ Nobody really knew him.”
Perhaps an extra surprise was the rather unusual special power that Wildberger’s ministry has been given: A spending veto over other federal departments if they want to make what the government calls “significant IT expenditures.” In Germany, spending control powers are normally only accorded to the Finance Ministry — though it is limited by the constitutionally-enshrined principle that each government ministry has a right to decide its own affairs.
“This spending control is a strong instrument, but he cannot say: ‘You have to spend it on something else,’” said Müller. “It’s only a veto.”
Müller hopes that Wildberger’s business credentials mean that he will be more inclined to measure his ministry’s performance according to actual indicators. Müller, whose organization Initiative D21 conducts annual surveys on people’s attitudes to digitalization, had her own suggestions for what these could be.
“For him to have success, I would expect to see the pick-up rate for digital services go up,” she said.
This could be reflected not only in how positively people see digital public services — “If people say, ‘the government actually makes my life easier’,” as Müller put it — but also in how well German citizens develop digital skills. “If I see a positive trend in those numbers, I would say he must have done something right,” she said.
This would be significant in a county where talk about digital services often descend into easy jokes about fax machines.
Edited by Rina Goldenberg
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