>>1895808>>1895818It used to be on par or better compared to most most developed European countries like 25 years ago, but since then simply
nothing has been done. Schröder's neoliberal push and Merkel's "do nothing" austerity policy have left us behind, and it's not like the current government is any better. That's why more and more foreigners who visit Germany refer to it as a shithole, you know, it didn't used to be that way, it was the opposite in fact. Liberals blame it on an overreaching bureaucracy, the more idealistic ones blame the German refusal to change.
Both are bullshit excuses for years of neoliberalism and an American-style gridlock policy where nothing ever changes. Yes, the way the bureaucracy organizes itself is outdated, but so is everything, complaining about bureaucracy is just an excuse to nibble more on the public sector. One of the main reasons for that is what is frankly legal corruption - let's take glass fiber cables for example. With the amount of data processing ever increasing, it's possible that German users might not even fully use the internet in year 10 anymore - unless mobile internet replaces landlines, but good luck get that through against the telecommunications lobby, which is private but entangled with the state (Telecom is a perfect example of the state-monopoly capitalism theory), that serves you contracts with data restrictions, even Poland does it better now. Many African countries have better internet than Germany.
The reason for that is public-private outsourcing. Let's say glass fiber cables are to be laid in a city, the city hires two or three private telecommincation companies, which then hire subcontractors that hire subcontractors themselves that hire door-to-door merchants to sell glass fiber contracts to the households at front door without appointment (who even signs a contract there) and are competing against one another - as you may imagine, this is completely retarded, because the companies have internal quotas that they won't lay glass fiber in the city if not at least 40% of the households sign the contract for the whole operation to be profitable, which is less likely to happen when you hire two competing firms! Neoliberal ideology is insane here. If against all odds a firm does have enough signatures, they hire another subcontractor (!) to actually lay the cables, which employs migrant workers and black market workers from South America, sometimes doing a shit job, ripping open streets and just disappearing and stuff like that. You know what many other countries do? Simply have the state lay glass fiber cables. Done.
That is just one example of how things work here, why do you think the Berlin airport took decades to build while China build the biggest most modern airport within 2 years? It's because whenever something does happen, so many people and entities want to get on the gravy train revealing a vast web of entanglement of corruption between the public and corporate sector, where only short-term profits for the shareholders matter, down to the small business sector. Our infrastructure is basically a sort of hustle culture, don't even look up the "mask deals" during the pandemic.