What the Mittelstand wants

THE BOSSESFDPSPDFDPSPDBVMW of Germany’s 3.6m medium-sized and small manufacturing firms would have loved to see last year’s general election yield a pro-business government of the centre-right Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (). What the Mittelstand got instead was a pact between the Social Democrats (), the and the Greens. That is still too leftie for many tastes. But it could have been worse. Plenty of chief executives feared that Olaf Scholz, the new chancellor, would row back his pre-election vow not to form a business-bashing coalition that would include , a hard-left party.A disaster averted may be one reason why the Mittelstand is not despondent at the start of the new year. Another is that big chunks of the coalition treaty, which runs the length of a slim novel, “go in the right direction”, says Hans-Jürgen Völz, chief economist of the , a Mittelstand trade body. Still, several gripes remain.