Ahem. We're talking about a country where a chancellor that pushed for building a gas pipeline from a foreign country went straight to the board of the foreign company running that pipeline after ending his term as chancellor.
Corruption is everywhere, it's just on different levels. Usually in more "developed" (I don't like that word) countries you see corruption on the highest levels, and people actually get away with it.
The way you word it makes it sound like "the corruption in developing countries is low-level, whereas in developed countries it's high-level". In reality, the corruption in developing countries is on all levels, whereas it's mostly only happening at a higher level in developing countries.
I wouldn't say so. To get the appropriate doctor to check my brother's broken arm and shoulder sooner than in more than a month (he needed surgery within 3 weeks max to avoid permanent damage) we had to employ personal contacts and gifts. I live in EU and this happened this summer.
It is another league, not like back home in Portugal, where everyone does everyone little "favours", you cannot even get into some hospitals without a little help.
That's just run-of-the-mill corruption like you would find anywhere else. Every country has this. Politicians will be politicians.
It hardly supports the thesis above. Germany is not rotten to the core by corruption. It's not a constant hindrance to someone trying to get things done.
> We're talking about a country where a chancellor that pushed for building a gas pipeline from a foreign country went straight to the board of the foreign company running that pipeline after ending his term as chancellor.
Yeah, and long after that they decided to build a second pipeline (Nord Stream 2).
And before that, they've been received the same gas from the same foreign company over the ex-SU Ukrainian pipelines.
And five years later we will likely see Turkish pipelines (still bearing Russian gas) prolonged to Hungary, from where it will reach Germany once again.
And that foreign company isn't even running those Nord Stream pipelines - they were largely German, due to legislations requiring separation of the pipeline operator and the supplier.
Don't underestimate how much Germany had profited from all the cheap gas and infrastructure investments from the said foreign country, up until they managed to loose it all just for the sake of political appearance and no real substantial win.
I wonder if we would some day see Scholz in some American LNG company for which the nation now has to pay order of magnitude more, than it ever paid to Russia.
At least for Germany... we're not overtly corrupt: you don't need to bribe policemen to get out of fake charges or traffic stops, you don't need to bribe city officials for building permits.
But at the large scale, we are absolutely a corrupt nation: our former Chancellor Schröder sold us out to Russia, there have been dozens of millions euros worth of (shockingly ruled legal) corruption during the pandemic, the large companies ("Deutschland AG") have an extremely cozy relationship with almost all parties in Germany, not to mention corporate donations and sponsorship of party gatherings (except far-right AfD whom no one serious wants to donate money to and far-left Linke who refuse to take corporate donations out of principle).
True, for building permits, either fast or out of the usual and other edge cases, you don't need to bribe people, you need to know the people in charge very well.
EDIT: Nobody wants to donate overtly to the AfD, that's why they had already multiple investigations into their finances and donations. A large part of which came from Switzerland. They do have those donation scandals in common with the CDU and CSU, those received anonymous donations in cash in briefcases. And Schäuble, who ended up as Finance Minister in the federal government later, got away with, I kid you not, "I do not remember that briefcase containing 100,000 bucks" (emphasize from me). So, it seems all parties in Germany are corrupt, some more than others, with the exact degree of corruption directly proportional to the time in actual power.
Or union labor. I needed some electrical work on a new house, but there's no electricians available for months. Hanging out with a contractor friend, I mentioned that the state law says "the homeowner OR a licensed electrician", and he reacted like doing it myself meant wiring the house with dead orphans or something. I've done electrical work, I just make more money in software so I'm not licensed, but that is somehow even worse because I'm depriving the union electricians of work. So now its a secret I take to my grave apparently.
The rule does make sense from a public safety point, because untrained people can do a lot of mistakes in electrical wiring. If you as the homeowner fuck it up and cause a fire, well that's on your own fault. If a licensed electrician fucks it up, their insurance pays for damages. If Joe Random fucks up their neighbor's electrical wiring, chances are high he has no insurance and now the homeowner is stuck with a burnt-down house.
You wrote: <<the large companies ... have an extremely cozy relationship with almost all parties in Germany>>
This is true in most highly industrialised countries. Can you name any where this is not true? I don't know any.
Another way to think about it: What is the polar opposite? "the large companies ... extremely unhealthy / combative relationship with almost all [political] parties". That sounds like the bad old days in 1980s India. Most economies would be a wreck if that were true.
I have dealt with bureaucracy in Italy and in Switzerland and if you think Switzerland has bad bureaucracy, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Just google Franz Josef Strauss for some history on German corruption. Followed by a quick search on how exactly the government sourced face masks during COVID (same political part basically).
For Switzerland, well, a quick search for money laundering gives you all the information you need.
EDIT: Both the FIFA and the IOCI, probably the most corrupt organizations on earth, are having their seats in Switzerland.
Yeah but that isn't like back home in Portugal, where everyone does everyone little "favours", you cannot even get into some hospitals without a little help.
Oh, corruption still exist, but most people are too poor to play in that league. Compare that to "developing country corruption", where you can often ... ahem ... prematurely show your gratitude towards an official for as little as 20 bucks.
Sure, but it is another league, not like back home in Portugal, where everyone does everyone little "favours", you cannot even get into some hospitals without a little help.
Almost forgot about that one... I wonder how they are going to contain the fallout from this to some low level BaFin employees and Wirecard's leadership. because it will be contained, nobody went to jail for things like the 2006 FIFA World Cup for example, or the various defense contracts in the last decade, or...
In the finance industry, BaFin is widely regarded as slow moving, out-of-date, and incompetant. Note that I did not use the term corrupt. Do you really think some BaFin staffers got bribes from Wirecard not to investigate? I doubt it.
