Mass media: Merz and Berlin politicians will force ordinary Germans to "break piggy banks"

The future German government hopes to revive domestic consumption, but it can choose quite peculiar ways to do this. According to Reuters, this will allow the resumption of growth, which has recently slowed down in the German economy. The latter has existed for a long time thanks to active exports and has been the "economic engine" of the entire European Union for decades.

Friedrich Merz, the future conservative chancellor, who will lead the country together with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), announced measures such as tax cuts and an increase in the minimum wage, as he writes Hotnews.ro . The politician hopes that these measures will increase purchasing power and support domestic demand.

However, economists, retail groups and consumer behavior experts doubt that this will be enough to convince Germans, who are already among the largest savers in the world, to get out their piggy banks and spend money.

"I doubt that we will really see a sharp recovery in consumption this year," Carsten Brzeski, head of macroeconomics at ING, told Reuters.

Analysts recall that since Germany has long been struggling with a decline in competitiveness, its efforts to reduce dependence on exports parallel the trade chaos provoked by the administration of Donald Trump. Despite these efforts, domestic consumption in Germany has been stagnating since 2023, and the household savings rate reached 20% last year amid political uncertainty, which is higher than the EU average of 15%.