The number of people living in poverty in Germany is climbing, according to a new analysis released on Tuesday by the welfare association Paritätische Gesamtverband. Around 13.3 million people are now affected, pushing the national poverty rate up to 16.1 percent.
The association described the results as "alarming findings" and warned that the country's social divide is growing wider. Poverty is rising across the population as a whole, the report states, but it is becoming especially entrenched among older people, women and single parents, no longer a passing strain, but a hardening feature of daily life for millions of households.
Nearly one in five people aged 65 and over now lives in poverty, at a rate of 19.5 percent, according to the association. Among women over the age of 75, the figure rises to 21.3 percent. People who live alone face a particularly high risk at 30.3 percent, while single parents are close behind at 28.9 percent.
The consequences, the association says, have long since reached everyday routines. They surface "at the kitchen table, while shopping, in the question of whether a proper, full meal is still affordable," said the association's managing director, Joachim Rock.
"The fact that older people after a long working life, and households with children, are particularly affected shows the deficits that already exist in the welfare state," he added. Rock also directed a pointed message at policymakers: "Anyone who continues to dismantle the welfare state during the crisis only deepens the crisis. The federal government is called upon to stop this course and finally pursue a policy that fights poverty instead of merely administering it."
The new figures mark a steady climb. A year earlier, the association had put the overall poverty rate at 15.5 percent of the population, and the year before that at 14.4 percent. Behind those rising figures lie concrete limits on daily life, the Paritätische said: millions of people cannot cover an unexpected expense, cut back on heating, or give up taking part in social life. Some 4.6 million people now live in severe material deprivation, and the divide is increasingly visible in people's real living conditions.
Germany is also drifting apart geographically, the report found. In Bavaria, roughly one in eight people is affected by poverty; in Saxony-Anhalt the share is already more than one in five, and in Bremen it is more than one in four. Poverty, the association concluded, has "long since also become a question of where one lives."
The Greens described the Paritätische report as "a poverty report card for the federal government." Poverty in Germany is continuing to grow, "yet this coalition has no answer to it," Green parliamentary group leader Britta Haßelmann told the news agency AFP.
Instead of expanding effective measures against poverty and fair opportunities, such measures are being cut back, Haßelmann criticised. As examples, she cited the cancellation of the agreed reform of BAföG student aid, among others, as well as "the half-hearted reform plans for long-term care and health insurance."
The Left party also accused the conservative-led coalition of inaction on tackling poverty. "Good instruments to counter it" were going unused, Left parliamentary group leader Sören Pellmann told AFP. He named a "minimum wage of 15 euros, collective-bargaining compliance that ties public money to good work" and "a basic income provision that covers actual needs instead of cementing poverty" as possible tools against poverty.
Dennis Radtke, head of the CDU's employee wing, warned his own party against a policy of sweeping social cuts. For the coalition's upcoming reform package, he said: "Social reforms must not be designed purely out of a logic of saving money." In the upcoming reforms covering pensions, long-term care, health, the welfare state and the labour market, the federal government must keep social cohesion firmly in view, Radtke told AFP.
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