Why Germany struggles to go digital – DW – 12/27/2025 | EUROtoday

When you progress home in Germany, it is advisable to register your new tackle with the authorities. That typically means calling metropolis corridor, ready weeks for an appointment, and exhibiting up in particular person with paper types.

Yes, in 2025! And when you neglect your medical health insurance card on the docs? Some apps can assist — by sending a fax.

“Around three-quarters, 77%, of German companies still use fax machines,” Felix Lesner from Bitkom, Germany’s IT trade affiliation, instructed DW. “And 25% use it often or very often.”

Why? “Most of the companies state that it’s essential for communication with the public authorities,” Lesner mentioned. “So maybe this is where the problem lies.”

Falling behind

The European Union commonly publishes rankings of digital growth amongst member states, with Germany performing someplace in the course of the 27-nation bloc — at finest. When it involves e-government, which means digital public companies, the nation lags particularly behind.

A examine by CapGemini, a consultancy, ranks Germany twenty fourth inside the European Union.

German engineers invented the programmable pc, the SIM card and MP3 expertise. Yet registering a automobile or getting a wedding license nonetheless means standing in line.

Frank Reinartz, head of the Digital Agency firm in Dusseldorf, says Germany would not have a problem with technique or targets, “we have an issue with getting things done.”

Dusseldorf, a metropolis of round 650.000 folks, gives 120 administrative companies on-line out of 580 — simply over 20%. And but, Dusseldorf is thought-about digitally superior and ranks sixth place within the Smart City Index compiled by Bitkom and measuring digital companies in German cities. Berlin, the nation’s capital, had difficulties makeing it into the Top 40.

‘Institutional inflation’

Germany’s federal authorities construction with 16 regional states typically leaves native communities to determine their very own options.

“We don’t have much software and processes coming from the federal [state] level,”  Reinartz instructed DW. “Each city has to find their own solution for a process which is nationwide, for example, car registration.”

Add to this an absence of coordination, and what researcher Stefanie Köhl calls “institutional inflation.”

Köhl and her colleagues at SHI Institute in Berlin examined why within the final 25 years, digital public companies did not actually take off in Germany.

“Everybody does something, but only in his or her silo. There’s no connection between solutions, sometimes also no compatibility between technologies,” she instructed DW.

Frank Reinartz’s Digital Agency was set as much as keep away from this. His imaginative and prescient for Dusseldorf’s digital future facilities on a web site the place residents can entry each public service on-line.

“You log in and see your building tax, if you are the owner, the kindergarten for your kids, and the parking permit for your car,” he mentioned.

Denmark: Digital wonderland

While Germany debates, Denmark delivers. Germany’s northern neighbor has turned Reinartz’s imaginative and prescient into actuality way back.

“The website Borger.dk is a one-stop-shop where all citizens have access to more than 2,000 public services on a digital platform,” explains Jakob Frier of Digital Hub Denmark in Copenhagen.

Almost all the things — from taxes to well being care — is on-line. The secret is a compulsory digital ID or eID, says Adam Lebech, deputy director-general of Denmark’s Agency for Digital Government.

“About 97% of the adult population have eID. And 83% use it at least once a week,” he instructed DW.

The digital basis of Denmarks system is a single-identification quantity known as Central Person Register (CPR) which the nation already launched in 1968.

“Since we use the same identifier for all systems, it makes data sharing easy,” mentioned Lebeck. “That means we can create seamless services across several authorities. You have to trust the government, of course.”

While common surveys present the vast majority of Danes belief their authorities, Germans are way more skeptical about state-run centralized knowledge gathering attributable to its Nazi and Communist previous.

Both, Hitler’s Third Reich and East Germany’s communist rulers used private knowledge to spy on folks and management their lives.

How India leapfrogs developments

India has proven the way it’s potential to make huge strides in creating digital companies establishing its personal digital ID system known as Aadhaar inside simply 15 years. Some 99.9% the Indian inhabitants use Aadhaar, official authorities knowledge says.

Meanwhile, Aadhaar is linked to a digital cost platform known as UPI (Unified Payment Interface) that even avenue distributors promoting coconuts in roadside stalls settle for as cost methodology. Customers merely switch the cash by way of a QR-code and a mobile-phone app.

Tej Paul Bhatla of India’s largest IT firm TCS instructed DW that each Aadhaar and UPI had been “foundational systems” which had been had been developed with help from the state but additionally funding from the personal sector.

Right from the start, Aadhaar and UPI had been deliberate as an open-source techniques for personal and public utilization, he mentioned, just like public infrastructure.

“When you build railroads or highways or ports, you make them available for everybody,” mentioned Bhatla, including that this has allowed private-sector intitiatives to use these techniques to “build larger services for citizens and businesses, and take advantage of these.”

Bhatla famous that the digital infrastructure was India’s likelihood to hurry up progress, in order that immediately “almost 80% of the adult population has bank accounts.” Without Aadhaar and UPI, “it would have taken us 48 years to reach the bank account penetration that we have today.”

Bhatla argues higher digital infrastructure and an ecosystem of digital companies, may additionally spark financial development in nations like Germany.

“If you don’t grow, you will definitely see threats coming in from other economies, and life is going to become harder,” he warned.

Edited by: Uwe Hessler

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