Andreas Pinkwart is a man who likes to tell one or two anecdotes – “Dönekes”, as they would say in his home state of North Rhine-Westphalia. For example, when the FDP politician talks about energy security during an election campaign in Höxter in East Westphalia, he talks about his first visit there in 1996.
At that time he drove home alone at night and suddenly felt like he was in another world – because there were flashing wind edges everywhere. This is how local media report on Pinkwart’s performance.
The 61-year-old is currently in the middle of the hot phase of the state election campaign. As a liberal “super minister”, Pinkwart has been entrusted with four topics in Düsseldorf over the past five years: economy, innovation, energy and digitization.
So for all these areas he needs stories at the moment to convince people that he and his party are moving the most populous federal state forward. At the moment, however, the Liberals in NRW are just eight percent in polls – four percentage points less than in the last election in 2017.
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Probably the biggest challenge for Pinkwart in the five years was in his area of responsibility for digitization. NRW was the first federal state to bundle competencies for digital topics in one department – so Pinkwart was, so to speak, the first German digital minister.
Three more years until digital administration?
He therefore started with an ambitious project: by 2025, the state’s administration should be digital and administrative procedures should be superfluous. The previous red-green government in Düsseldorf had spoken of 2031 as the target year. Pinkwart wanted nothing less than to modernize NRW – but did he succeed?
If you ask Andreas Pinkwart himself about it, he will, of course, tell you an anecdote. Between his two ministerial posts as Research Minister until 2010 and Economics and Digital Minister from 2017, Pinkwart headed the Leipzig Graduate School of Management. When he returned to North Rhine-Westphalian politics after his excursion into science, he noticed that nothing had happened in digital politics during this time. He wanted to change that.
“I placed great value on digital skills in my students,” reports Pinkwart. Even now, as minister, he is giving his company’s employees the opportunity to undergo further digital training in order to motivate them to “make digitization their own task”.
In January, Pinkwart celebrated the “milestone” of 10,000 state administration employees who would process their files purely digitally. However, according to its own careers website, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has a total of over 300,000 employees.
Andreas Pinkwart in conversation with the member of parliament Wibke Brems (Greens).
(Photo: imago images/Michael Gstettenbauer)
At the end of last year, the minister also reported that 14 goals of his digital strategy had been implemented – these include the promotion of blockchains or educational opportunities for media skills.
Christina Kampmann, spokeswoman for digitization of the SPD parliamentary group in the state parliament, puts what Pinkwart records as a success in a different context: “Of a total of 44 goals, only 14 were implemented,” she points out. The ministry dated most of the promises outside of the legislative period. “For a state government that has made digitization its flag, that’s not satisfactory,” she criticizes.
Kampmann nevertheless praises the cooperation with Pinkwart. “As a person, he rightly has a very good reputation,” she says. Politically, on the other hand, he is known as an announcement minister who likes to report on individual examples – “but they cannot hide structural problems,” says Kampmann. Rural areas, for example, continue to resemble a “digital desert” when it comes to the supply of fast Internet.
Great dissatisfaction with digitization
By 2022, Pinkwart’s ministry had promised, all commercial areas should actually be connected to the fiber optic network. According to a parliamentary inquiry by the Greens, by the end of 2020 there were only 782 out of almost 4,000.
Only about ten percent of people in NRW are satisfied with the digital infrastructure, about four percent with the digital administration – this is the result of a Civey survey commissioned by the digital association Eco. There is still room for improvement, but NRW is roughly in the middle of the field compared to other federal states in the survey.
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There is still good news for Pinkwart and his FDP. Because according to the Civey survey, almost 30 percent of those surveyed in NRW consider the Liberals to be the party with the best digital skills. This puts the FDP far ahead of all other parties in North Rhine-Westphalia – and has the highest approval rating across all federal states.
So there is a lot of momentum for the digital minister, who is happy to explain which image he uses for his view of German bureaucracy and the digitization of administration: “Germany not only invented bureaucracy, but also developed it to perfection in the analogue world with elaborate regulations that we now want to transfer it one-to-one into the digital world.” But he is certain: “It can’t work, we have to rethink the rules and processes and significantly simplify them.”
More: More courage, less small-stateism – How Germany’s administration should learn from the economy