Chancellor Friedrich Merz took to the Bundestag lectern this week to deliver — in his characteristically forthright manner — the government's position on what he called one of the next major priorities for his government: His plans to reform the unemployment benefit, or Bürgergeld ("citizen's income").

He rang a familiar tune on the subject of work: Work, he argued, needs to be worth it. He wanted "to ensure that people in Germany as a whole can once again see that their efforts are paying off and that the principle of performance-related pay will once again be applied."

But his remark was somewhat undercut by a statistic that emerged a few days earlier: In 2024, some 826,000 working people were dependent on benefits, or Bürgergeld ("citizen's income") as it is called in Germany.

That represents an increase of around 30,000 since 2023 — the first time that the number of employed people receiving a top-up had increased since 2015.

That, perhaps not coincidentally, was also the year Germany introduced its first basic minimum wage. At the time, over a million workers were still dependent on state benefits, a number that has steadily decreased since. These extra benefits cost the state nearly €7 billion ($8.1 billion) in 2024 — over a billion more than the €5.7 billion the state paid for such cases in 2022.

The government revealed the figures in response to a parliamentary question from Bundestag member Cem Ince of the socialist Left Party, who told DW: "It is unacceptable that........

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