The fact that Wissing’s ministry is titled “digital” is like a farce.
(Photo: imago images/photothek)
With the traffic light everything should be different. The SPD, Greens and FDP promised to solve the sleepy digitization of the German administration, the many dead spots and above all the chaos of responsibility for digital policy issues.
Almost a month after the new government was sworn in, one thing is clear: at least the goal of centralizing digital issues already seems to have been missed.
Volker Wissing’s (FDP) Ministry of Transport only received the addition of “digital” at the last minute in the coalition negotiations. To simulate urgency, it was placed at the front of the doorbell. However, not much else happened.
The fact that Wissing’s ministry is titled “digital” is like a farce. The few competencies that his house gets in digital matters hardly justify that he can call himself Minister for Digital Affairs.
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According to this logic, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) and Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) also deserve the title – their houses also deal with digital and technology issues, among other things.
Mega and not cross-sectional topic
The traffic light thus risks a “continue as before”, which must not exist in digital politics under any circumstances. In the past, the fragmentation of the topic of digitization into departments, departments and sub-departments meant that digital transformation was not seen as a huge task for society as a whole, but rather as an area of responsibility for individual employees.
It is said again and again that digitization must be distributed across the ministries – after all, it is a cross-cutting issue. That’s wrong. The digital transformation affects almost all areas of our lives today. But that is precisely why it must be considered everywhere as a mega-topic for society as a whole and not cut up into ministerial responsibilities.
A separate ministry for digital transformation would have been the easier way to meet the upcoming challenge. The traffic light did not choose this path. Now she’s left with a far more difficult option to deliver on her promise to go digital.
The working methods of the ministries must be reformed so radically in the shortest possible time that isolated thinking about responsibilities is a thing of the past. The traffic light will only be able to keep its ambitious promises if the departments of the various ministries jointly embark on the mission of digitally transforming Germany.
So the government has to modernize itself before it can modernize the country.
More: Wrangling over digital responsibilities – Digital Minister Wissing has to relinquish power.