Is Karsten Wildberger really Germany's Elon Musk?

Karsten Wildberger was himself a little surprised to be appointed to Chancellor Friedrich Merz's new Cabinet. It all happened "rather suddenly," the 55-year-old said at one of his first public appearances in late April, the formal handover at the office of his predecessor, Volker Witting.Strictly speaking, of course, Wildberger doesn't really have a predecessor, because his Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization is entirely new, but the Transport Ministry happens to be where he and his team have temporarily been accommodated. Things are moving quickly: Officially an independent when appointed, the new minister only became a member of Merz's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) last week.

But 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 involves administering the state's IT infrastructure is 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 have led to comparisons with Elon Musk and the radical government cuts that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Donald Trump's second administration have brought in the United States.Niklas Potrafke, director of the Center for Public Finance and Political Economy at the Ifo institute in Munich, argued that the quality that Wildberger and Musk might have in common is "disruption.""I mean doing certain things in a different way, thinking in a completely new way," he told DW. "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 and gleefully swinging a chainsaw at a political rally any time soon.

For one thing, he does not have known sympathies with the far-right. Nor is Wildberger's tone on government cuts as aggressive as Musk's: "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 news magazine reported, Wildberger also said he would work with "respect, curiosity, determination, and teamplay" — plus, he added cryptically, a dash of "friendly tenacity."In one way, Potrafke thinks the Musk comparisons are not really suitable. "Elon Musk is, I think, 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.But Wildberger certainly shares Musk's taste for radically stripping back business regulations.

"For every law, two must be repealed. Is that possible?" he said on Tuesday, in a speech at a meeting of the CDU-affiliated business lobby group the Economic Council.He also mentioned two laws that he believes are ripe for scrapping: The supply chain law, designed to protect human rights and guard against the use of modern slavery in multinational supply chains, and the heating law, which is meant to make heating systems in new buildings more climate-friendly.

Regulation versus 'disruption'

Potrafke admitted that putting business executives in government has its dangers. "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."There are some regulations in place that are meant to prevent this. Unlike Musk, Wildberger will be subject to the European Union's rather stricter data privacy regulations, as well as its new AI regulations.

Wildberger said that artificial intelligence represented a great growth opportunity and that he intended to examine the new regulations to see how they can be applied in an innovation-friendly way.Meanwhile, Wildberger's powers will also be hedged by Germany's federal system, which means the state governments and local district authorities have a lot of power over their own digital 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, for instance, the then incoming Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder 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 controls 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 background means 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 indeed be a significant step forward in a county where talk about digital services often descends into easy jokes about fax machines.