Germany’s Mid-Sized Enterprises Look Pessimistically at 2025
A recent survey by the “Welt am Sonntag” shows that Germany’s middle class is looking gloomily at the year 2025. According to Christoph Ahlhaus, the Federal Managing Director of the Association of the German Middle Class (BVMW), “the water is up to the neck for many small and medium-sized enterprises”. He also expressed low expectations for 2025, stating that the assessment of the current situation is as bad as during the pandemic times. Ahlhaus called for an end to the struggle, stagnation, and chaos in politics, demanding a government that can take action and create reliable and competitive framework conditions for all companies.
According to the German Middle Class Association (DMB), not even a third of the companies expect growth in the new year under the current circumstances. “The German middle class is currently in one of the most severe economic crises of the 2000s” said Marc S. Tenbieg, the managing director of the DMB, analyzing the situation. He attributed the current crisis to a toxic mix of the effects of a structural economic change, excessive planning uncertainty, a lack of investment, and a prolonged economic downturn, as well as a psychological component.
The responsibility of politics was emphasized and criticized by all the associations in the survey. While the middle class is often praised as the backbone of the German economy in Sunday speeches, in reality, it faces hurdle after hurdle in the political arena. “The politics of the last years have braked the middle class across the board” said Henning Bergmann, the main managing director of the Middle Class Association ZGV.
According to the survey, the middle class is primarily concerned with four issues regarding location improvements: less bureaucracy, lower taxes and fees, competitive energy prices, and a resolute fight against the shortage of skilled and unskilled labor. The theme of bureaucracy is particularly focused on in the responses of the associations in the “Welt am Sonntag” survey. “Annual costs of 65 billion euros are no longer sustainable for the German economy” said Wolfgang Weber, the chairman of the management board of the Association of the Electrical and Digital Industry (ZVEI).