Due to the numerous crises, more and more people are no longer able to manage their household income. “While in a survey in the summer of 2020, more than half of the respondents said they were very well or well off with their household income, this was the case for only about 38% of the respondents in 2023 and 2024” according to the unpublished “Distribution Report 2024” of the German Economy Institute (IW), as reported by the “Rheinische Post” in its Tuesday edition. “A quarter said they were relatively bad, bad, or very bad off with their income” it says.
The researchers attribute the cause to: “The corona pandemic, the energy price crisis, and the resulting high inflation rates have left their mark. The real wage index was at the level of 2015 on average in 2023.”
Child poverty is higher than that of seniors, but the perception is different. “While empirically the measured poverty risk of children is higher than in the group of the elderly, the extent of poverty is perceived as much higher among retirees, according to the IW person survey 2024” the study says. The poverty risk for retirees and pensioners is 18.7%, that of single parents 41%, and that of families with three or more children 30.1%.
Supporters of the AfD and BSW see particularly high risks for retirees: “While over 60% of AfD and BSW supporters believe that at least one in three retirees in Germany is at risk of poverty, this percentage is under 46% among supporters of other parties. The lowest percentage is among FDP supporters, at around 37%” write authors Judith Niehues and Maximilian Stockhausen.
The demands that AfD and BSW supporters derive from this are, however, fundamentally different: “While the majority of BSW supporters want to expand redistribution policies, the majority of AfD supporters look at poverty with a very pessimistic outlook and reject the expansion of (blanket) state redistribution policies” the IW study says.