The Best the Establishment Can Do

I. Who Is Speaking Here

In July 2025, Herder Verlag published a 161-page final report titled Initiative für einen handlungsfähigen Staat — Initiative for an Effective State. Four authors: Julia Jäkel, former CEO of Gruner + Jahr. Thomas de Maizière, former Federal Interior Minister (CDU). Peer Steinbrück, former Federal Finance Minister (SPD). Andreas Voßkuhle, former President of the Federal Constitutional Court. Patron: Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Hertie Foundation, Stiftung Mercator and ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.

This is not civil society. It is not the opposition. It is the organised establishment of the Federal Republic reflecting on itself. That is remarkable — and it is the precondition for reading the report correctly.

II. The Diagnosis — Precise and Courageous

The strongest part of the report is the situational analysis. The authors write without embellishment: Germany is not truly capable of defence. The infrastructure is dilapidated. The secure energy supply has disappeared. Climate change has not been tackled with sufficient resolve. Federal and state governments are deadlocked. Digitalisation has been delayed. And: the formerly successful export model of the German economy risks running out, without anything genuinely new appearing on the horizon.

This is said by four people who helped shape this system. De Maizière was Interior Minister in the coalition that delayed digitalisation. Steinbrück was Finance Minister in the coalition that neglected infrastructure investment for decades. Voßkuhle helped design a system that turned understandable individual case protection into structural paralysis. That they now state this so plainly is not self-criticism — it is honest stocktaking. And that has value.

The structural core diagnosis is precise: the problem does not lie with individual politicians, but with a system that systematically sets wrong incentives. The authors call it the perfectionism trap: whoever wants to please everyone, wants to guarantee maximum individual justice in every reform, inevitably falls into the trap — the result is barely readable, hypercomplicated legislation with enormous compliance costs. This is not the failure of individual actors. It is the rational outcome of a system where nobody takes responsibility for overall consequences.

III. The Recommendations — A Mixed Picture

The report contains 35 recommendations across ten thematic areas. Some of them have real substance.

Recommendation 1 — legislative procedures become more thorough, integrative, transparent and implementation-oriented — addresses a genuine mechanism. The processing time of a law was halved in the last parliamentary term to 44 days. No good law can be created in six weeks. Giving the National Regulatory Control Council a suspensive veto right is structurally correct — it creates an institution accountable for quality.

Recommendations 4 and 5 — clear assignment of tasks between federal, state and municipal levels, with the right of states to take legally binding joint decisions — address the core problem of German federalism: not too much federalism, but too little clarity of responsibility. When everyone is a little bit responsible but never fully responsible, nobody decides.

Recommendation 17 — the state assumes the role of strategic client and investor — has strategic depth. Public procurement amounts to over 300 billion euros annually. This sum is not deployed strategically. Here lies a genuine lever: for digitalisation, for European cloud infrastructure, for innovation promotion. The proposal to overcome the "not-invented-here mentality" in state digitalisation projects and make use of standard commercial offerings is equally correct and long overdue.

Other recommendations are weaker. Recommendation 33 — a universal service obligation — is a socio-political project with no discernible connection to state effectiveness. It is a tribute to the patron, not to the analysis. And Recommendation 26 — all social benefits delivered through a single digital platform — is precisely what Germany has been announcing for fifteen years and never implementing, because the technical and federal preconditions are absent. Formulating it as a recommendation without naming those preconditions is of limited help.

IV. What Is Missing — The Blind Spots

The most serious shortcoming of the report is what it does not address.

The European level is almost entirely absent. Approximately 60 to 70 percent of all German legislation is determined by EU law. A reform of the German legislative process that does not address European over-regulation is patchwork. One can strengthen the national regulatory control council — but if Brussels simultaneously produces directives that undermine the entire reformed procedure at the implementation stage, the wrong problem has been solved.

Digital dependency is absent entirely. The section on the digital state recommends a ministry (already created), personnel reforms and better federal-state coordination. Not a word about the fact that the state whose effectiveness this report seeks to strengthen depends for its critical IT infrastructure on three American companies — Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. The server rooms of German federal agencies, the communication systems of ministries, the data storage of millions of citizens' records: all on infrastructure subject to the US CLOUD Act. This is not a footnote — it is the greatest structural vulnerability of a modern state. It does not appear in the report.

And there is no mechanism against the core problem the report itself describes so precisely: the democratic time paradox. Those who invest today harvest in ten years. Those who speak today harvest at the next election. The report diagnoses this mechanism on page 27 — but proposes not a single structural intervention that would change this incentive. All 35 recommendations presuppose that politicians want to act. Why should they, if the system works against it?

V. The Structural Irony

The report describes precisely the problem it itself exemplifies. It is too long, too complex, insufficiently prioritised. Thirty-five recommendations across ten areas is not a programme — it is a list. An effective state does not emerge from pursuing 35 things simultaneously. The report names no sequence, no dependencies, no answer to the question: if the new federal government implements only three of these recommendations — which three?

It addresses everyone and thereby misses the decision-capable addressee. It contains good ideas alongside weak ones, without distinguishing between them. It was written by people who know the system well — and it bears the hallmarks of that system.

This is not a personal reproach. It is a structural observation: those who have operated for decades in a system that rewards complexity also write reform proposals with the complexity of that system. That is unavoidable — and it is why reforms from within are so rarely transformative.

VI. What the Report Does Achieve

Despite this criticism, the report has not been without effect. Several proposals found their way into the coalition agreement of the new federal government. The Ministry for Digitalisation and State Modernisation was founded on the initiative's suggestion. The guiding principle of "trust rather than mistrust" in state action appears in the coalition agreement.

That is not nothing. The report has produced a political impact it could not have produced without the institutional authority of its authors and the backing of the Federal President. This is the classic model of policy advice: ideas that find no resonance in academic or civil society spaces are made acceptable through the right names and networks.

That is a legitimate — and often underestimated — contribution. It is not analysis that makes policy, but the legitimation of ideas by recognised authorities. In this sense, the initiative has fulfilled its mandate.

VII. What Follows

This report is the best that the German establishment is currently producing about itself. That is an ambivalent compliment — but it is not a small one. In a political culture prone to self-congratulation, honest diagnosis is already a beginning.

What is missing is the next step: the willingness to set priorities and to stand behind the claim that other things must yield. Those who want to reform everything simultaneously reform nothing. Those who give 35 recommendations without naming which three are decisive give the political machinery the opportunity to take the easy ones and leave the hard ones.

The question the report does not answer — and which is the actually decisive one — is: what must a state be able to do to remain effective in the world of 2030? Not: what has it done badly so far. But: what capabilities does it need that it does not currently have?

Digital sovereignty. Strategic investment capacity beyond the debt brake. An administration that can work with AI systems without becoming dependent on them. The ability to build European coalitions instead of patching things up nationally. And a political system that immunises long-term decisions against short-term electoral cycles.

None of this is in this report. That is not a criticism of the authors — it is a description of the limits of what establishment reflection can achieve. It names the past precisely. The future must be thought elsewhere.

A state that does not function loses the trust of its citizens.
A state that is not sovereign loses more:
the capacity to decide at all
what it wants to make function.