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.

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 his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Donald Trump's second administration in the United States.

Niklas Potrafke, director of the Center for Public Finance and Political Economy at the ifo economic institute in Munich, argued that the quality that Wildberger and Musk might have in common is........

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