612 million euros for gender projects? The real spending problem of the state – record taxes at home, millions for abroad

The 612 million euro controversy: Is the state cutting spending on its citizens and distributing the money abroad?

Queer theatre and ecofeminism: What's really behind the millions in development aid?

While citizens and businesses in Germany groan under record taxes, paralyzing bureaucracy, and high energy costs, politicians often point to empty coffers when it comes to urgently needed relief measures. However, a recent analysis now highlights figures that cast doubt on this narrative for many: The government recently spent around €612 million on international development projects whose primary goal is gender equality – from ecofeminist local politics in Asia to queer theater projects. Even though this sum represents only a fraction of the gigantic federal budget, it touches a raw nerve in society. The apparent contradiction raises a fundamental question that extends far beyond feminist foreign policy: Does Germany actually have a revenue problem – or simply the wrong spending priorities?

When the state saves for the world, but cannot save for itself

A country that complains about empty coffers and yet distributes millions

Few topics currently provoke as much outrage in Germany as the question of how the state spends its money while companies simultaneously groan under high taxes, bureaucracy, and energy costs. The trigger for the latest debate is a data analysis by the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung," according to which Germany spent around €612 million in 2025 on development projects where gender equality was defined as a primary goal. The previous year, the figure was €704 million, representing a decrease of approximately 13 percent. Despite this decline, the share of such projects in the total development budget remained almost constant at 5.4 percent, compared to 5.6 percent the previous year. These figures are the highest of any year prior to 2024 and demonstrate that, despite the change of government to Friedrich Merz, there has been little sign of a genuine shift in policy.

What's really behind the sensational headline

The widely circulated summary that these are simply expenditures for gender projects is too simplistic and can create a distorted picture. The Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development record all projects whose primary goal is gender equality, which can include, among other things, the protection of women from violence, improved healthcare, education for girls, economic participation, and the strengthening of women's rights. However, a complete, publicly accessible table with a project list, exact funding amounts, and results evaluation does not currently exist, meaning that the figure of 612 million euros is based on a journalistic media analysis and not on official, comprehensive government statistics. This does not change the fundamental validity of the criticism, but it makes it clear that a more nuanced analysis is necessary before dismissing it as a purely ideological project.

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Specific individual projects that provide material for discussion

Besides the total amount of funding, it is primarily individual, high-profile projects that attract attention and fuel the debate. For example, in Indonesia, around €392,000 is being used to support ecofeminist approaches in local politics. Feminist development policy in Armenia, Colombia, Rwanda, and Tunisia will receive a total of €10 million in support until 2027, while a further €20 million is earmarked for local and regional civil society actors involved in feminist transformation in Africa until 2028. In addition, around €1.1 million flowed to an international umbrella organization of LGBTQ organizations in 2026. A particularly striking example is a funded theater project with queer themes in North Macedonia, which is seen by some in the public sphere as evidence of German development aid's completely misguided priorities. Such individual cases are small in number, but they have a considerable symbolic impact because they are easy to communicate and emotionally charged.

The strategic basis behind the numbers

These expenditures are not accidental, but rather the result of a deliberate political decision initiated in 2023 under the then Development Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD). With the strategy "Feminist Development Policy for Just and Strong Societies Worldwide," the Ministry launched a program based on the so-called three "Rs": strengthening rights, resources, and representation for women and other disadvantaged groups. The target was set that by 2025, exactly 93 percent of all newly committed project funding from the Ministry should contribute to gender equality, while the proportion of projects with equality as an explicit primary objective was to be doubled to 8 percent. The Federal Foreign Office pursued a similar goal, aiming to allocate 85 percent of its project funding to gender-sensitive initiatives and 8 percent to gender transformation initiatives by 2025. In the 2023 fiscal year, 87.4 percent of the German Foreign Office's funds, equivalent to approximately 4.8 billion euros, were already classified as gender budgeting according to these criteria, of which 69 percent were classified as gender-sensitive and 2.3 percent as gender-transformative. These figures illustrate that the much-discussed 612 million euros represent only the tip of a significantly more comprehensive system of gender mainstreaming guidelines in German foreign and development policy, which now permeates virtually the entire budget.

Between austerity measures and ideological continuity

Interestingly, while the German government under Friedrich Merz rhetorically announced a change of course in development policy and aimed to align funding more closely with strategic German interests, the underlying quota requirements remain essentially unchanged. A spokesperson for the responsible ministry confirmed upon request that development policy will continue to have a feminist orientation, with two quotas being used in the future: a secondary target quota of 85 percent and a primary target quota of 8 percent for gender equality projects. At the same time, the overall budget of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has shrunk drastically in recent years, from almost €13.8 billion in 2022 to a projected figure of less than €10 billion in 2026, representing a decline of approximately 30 percent. Cuts of €940 million to the BMZ budget were already planned for the 2025 fiscal year, particularly affecting programs in the area of ​​sexual and reproductive health, for example, through a €7.5 million reduction in funding for the United Nations Population Fund. The contradiction, therefore, does not lie in the fact that no cuts are being made at all, but rather in the fact that within a shrinking overall pie, the relative share of equality-related spending hardly decreases, while other areas, which critics consider more important, such as traditional infrastructure aid or economic development, are being cut back more significantly.

The real crux of the criticism: not a revenue problem, but a spending problem

The pointed assertion that Germany has not a revenue problem, but rather a spending and priorities problem, can certainly be supported by examining the overall structure of its public finances. Germany's tax and contribution burden reached a historic high in 2025, at almost 42 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP). With corporate tax rates exceeding 30 percent, Germany ranks third among all OECD countries, significantly above the OECD average of just 23.9 percent. The effective tax rate of nearly 27 percent is also among the highest in the entire organization. Added to this is a considerable bureaucratic burden, which the Federal Statistical Office recently estimated at around 62.5 to 64 billion euros annually for the German economy. The ifo Institute, however, estimates the total economic cost of bureaucratic regulations, including indirect effects, at up to 146 billion euros per year, which corresponds to approximately 3.4 percent of GDP. The German government itself has set a goal of reducing the direct bureaucratic costs for businesses by 25 percent, or around 16 billion euros, during this legislative period, demonstrating that even official bodies acknowledge a significant need for action. Given these parameters, the oft-cited lack of financial leeway when it comes to tax relief for companies or citizens seems genuinely questionable, especially when hundreds of millions of euros are simultaneously available for comparatively marginal international programs.

Overview of the 2026 Federal Budget

A look at the overall structure of the federal budget puts the debate into perspective in terms of its quantitative dimensions. For 2026, the federal government plans total expenditures of €524.5 billion, an increase of approximately €31.3 billion, or 6.3 percent, compared to the previous year. By far the largest expenditure category remains social security, including family, youth, and labor market policies, at €245.1 billion, representing a social benefits share of 46.7 percent of total expenditures. Defense spending follows in second place at around €100.9 billion, its share having increased almost one and a half times from 12.2 percent in 2024 to 17.8 percent, marking the highest share since 1989. Against this backdrop, the €612 million allocated to equality projects in development cooperation appears as a vanishingly small share, well below one per mille of the entire federal budget. The real criticism is therefore directed less against the absolute fiscal relevance of this sum, but against its symbolic and communicative effect at a time when many citizens and companies are getting the impression that elsewhere extreme frugality is being used.

Why symbolism often has a stronger effect than the number itself

From a communications economics perspective, the outcry surrounding the 612 million euros is easily explained, even though the sum is marginal in relation to the overall state budget. People rarely evaluate government spending based on its relative share of the total budget, but rather on the perceived legitimacy and comprehensibility of its purpose. A multi-million-euro theater project abroad with queer themes, or a study on the number of genders in a distant country, can be sensationalized on social media, creating a strong emotional contrast to everyday experiences such as rising energy prices, dilapidated schools, or closed bridges at home. This perception gap between fiscal relevance and perceived injustice is a central element of modern fiscal policy and is deliberately exploited by political actors from all sides to shape or counter public sentiment. Entrepreneurs and employees who are confronted daily with rising taxes and regulatory burdens find even small, ideologically charged expenditure items particularly provocative, even if other budget items are many times larger.

A look at the coming years and structural consequences

The federal government's medium-term financial plan shows that total spending is projected to increase significantly, from €524.5 billion in 2026 to €555.4 billion in 2027 and finally to €635.4 billion in 2030. At the same time, net borrowing is expected to rise from €98 billion in 2026 to €167.3 billion in 2030, indicating increasing debt despite rising tax revenues, which are projected to grow from €387.2 billion in 2026 to €437.3 billion in 2030. Significantly, the social spending ratio is expected to fall from 46.7 percent in 2026 to 43.0 percent in 2027 and then remain at that level, suggesting that at least in the largest spending category, a degree of consolidation is being pursued. For development cooperation as a whole, the ongoing pressure to cut costs means that absolute amounts for equality projects are likely to continue to decline, without any change to the fundamental strategic direction and the underlying quota targets, as long as the corresponding action plans are not officially withdrawn politically.

A sober assessment of the debate

The controversy surrounding the 612 million euros ultimately reveals a deeper structural problem in German fiscal policy that extends far beyond the specific debate on gender equality. At its core, the issue is not whether feminist development policy is inherently sensible or misguided—a matter ripe for political and academic debate—but rather that the recurring claim of a lack of financial leeway is hardly tenable given the actual budgetary structure. Germany has one of the highest tax and contribution burdens of all industrialized nations and simultaneously spends considerable sums year after year on programs whose priority over more pressing domestic challenges such as infrastructure maintenance, education, or targeted economic relief is at the very least debatable. An honest political debate should therefore focus less on individual symbolic projects and more on fundamentally clarifying the priorities the state intends to set and how it justifies these transparently and comprehensibly to its citizens, instead of simply citing a lack of funds in response to every request for tax relief, while elsewhere hundreds of millions of euros continue to flow into ideologically driven foreign projects.