I mostly get around Berlin on public transport, and I run into all kinds of people. But you know who you absolutely never meet on the train, bus, tram, or ferry? Members of the Bundestag. There is a simple explanation: politicians are, without exception, wealthy.
A member of the Bundestag (MdB) gets €11,227.20 per month. For comparison, the median income of full-time workers in Berlin is €3,806 — a parliamentarian gets three times as much. But that number is distorted, since over a third of Berlin workers have part-time positions, and almost 10% are unemployed. This means politicians are earning more like 4-5 times as much as a normal worker.
They get an additional €5,349,58 to set up an office in their district. But no one checks how this is spent — it can pay for rent or also crystal meth. They get to spend up to €25,874 per month hiring assistants. They get unlimited free travel on Deutsche Bahn (a €500 value), and flights are reimbursed. They get chauffeured around Berlin in big black limousines — which is why you never run into them on the bus.
Counting this stuff together, every MdB is getting closer to €20,000 per month. These are the “representatives of the people,” but every single one of them is among the top 1% of earners. That’s why the parliament costs around a billion euros. But we’re just getting started…
Legal Corruption
Besides representing the people — apparently not a very demanding job — MdBs are explicitly allowed to have second jobs as long as the parliament is “at the center” of their activity. They only have to make vague declarations about such income, but at least 37 MdBs earn over €100.000 per year — one even declared an extra income of €3.4 million!
Jens Spahn is a racist agitator and former health minister. Back in 2018, he said that the €416 from Bürgergeld (citizen’s benefit) are enough to live off. But how could he possibly know? At the time, he was earning €15,311 — 37 times as much. But he didn’t have to survive off his official salary. Spahn worked as a lobbyist for Big Pharma while he was on the Bundestag’s healthcare committee, and he acquired a villa worth €4-5 million in Berlin-Dahlem with the help of a mysterious loan.
In other words, elected representatives are cashing in while in office. Isn’t this the very definition of corruption? Yet this is all completely legal.
Illegal Corruption
Germans see their country as ninth least corrupt country in the world, with a score of 78 out of 100 on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Open any newspaper, and corruption is widespread and barely hidden. For a prominent example, take that of, fortunately deceased, imperialist gremlin Wolfgang Schäuble, who was caught taking an envelope with 100,000 German marks in cash from a weapons dealer. This barely made a dent in Schäuble’s career; he went on to be a minister and Bundestag president, and when he died, he was lauded as a great statesman.
Or look at current chancellor Scholz, who helped banks steal billions from public coffers and get away scot-free. Scholz has been stonewalling investigations, yet hasn’t faced any consequences.
This goes across the political spectrum — it’s why parties mostly don’t scandalize each other’s corruption. The far-right AfD, which rails against a corrupt establishment, probably has the biggest corruptions scandals, with illegal donations from far-right billionaires.
Even More Legal Corruption
Occasionally, an MdB will get in trouble for collecting millions. Yet most corruption in Germany is legal. The social democrat Sigmar Gabriel, a former vice chancellor, was collecting €10,000 a month from Tönnies, a company running meat-packing plants with hyperexploited immigrant labor. Gabriel defended himself by reminding people he was no longer a politician — €10,000 might seem like a lot of money to most people, but “in this industry, that’s not a particularly high amount”
Indeed, Gabriel had numerous such contracts going. And this is how money gets funneled to politicians: they get huge payouts, but only after they’ve left the Bundestag. I doubt such deals are ever put in writing, but everyone understands how they work, it’s bribery with delayed gratification.
A retired politician can get millions every year serving as a “consultant” or a member of a company board, which means going to a resort for a couple of weekends a year and signing some papers. It’s a payout. Lenin wrote that in the democratic republic, corruption is “developed into an exceptional art.” And the Federal Republic of Germany is indeed quite a “developed” country.
This is one of many mechanisms that ensures that bourgeois democracy is not actually democratic. The people are allowed to vote for their representatives but whoever they elect automatically becomes a member of the 1%. Is it any wonder they tend to sympathize with landlords, with people who own apartment buildings, more than with those of us who rent apartments?
Workers’ Candidates
In this election, there are workers running for the Bundestag who reject this systematic corruption. The social worker Inés Heider and her comrades have promised that if elected, they will only take a nurse’s salary — which is close to the median, around €3,800. They would donate the difference — over €7,000 — to a strike fund to support other workers’ struggles.
This is one of many ways they are challenging the “common sense” of capitalist politics. A socialist election campaign is not about getting votes. Rather, it’s about helping working people understand that this system is designed to serve the capitalists, not for us. Demands against ingrained corruption are part of an anticapitalist program.
Nathaniel has been publishing the column Red Flag about Berlin politics since 2020. It has a new home at The Left Berlin, where it will be published every Wednesday.
