Compiled by: Sahar Yaghoubi
There are now an estimated 13.8 million impoverished individuals in Germany, 600,000 more than there were before the outbreak, according to a survey by a German charity agency.
According to a survey by a German welfare group, poverty levels in the country are at an all-time high, with the Covid-19 epidemic playing a role in this.
According to a research by Paritatische Gesamtverband issued on Wednesday, the poverty rate in the nation peaked in 2021 at 16.6 percent, a condition that might be made worse by inflation.
The group said that after accounting for inflation, the number of poor in Germany rose to 13.8 million, 600,000 more than it had been before the epidemic.
The Paritatische Gesamtverband adopts the EU’s definition of poverty, which states that anybody with an income of less than 60% of the median is poor. Wages, pensions, unemployment, housing, and child benefits are all included into the total.
Paritatisches Gesamtverband leader Ulrich Schneider called the results “scary,” adding that the economic impacts of the epidemic are now having their full impact.
To put it another way, “never before has poverty spread as swiftly as during the epidemic,” and “never before has a larger value been measured based on the official micro census.”
The survey found that many working individuals, especially those who were self-employed, fell into poverty as a result of the pandemic’s devastating effects on their livelihoods. The percentage of people living in poverty among them rose from 9% to 13.1%.
Furthermore, the survey noted a rise in the poverty rate among both children and young people (20.8%) and retirees (17.9%).
I’ve only ever seen starving kids and adults in Germany. Wolfgang Buscher, a spokesperson for the Christian children and youth charity Die Arche, warned local media that “hunger is not far away.”
The charity group takes care of 4,500 kids across 30 centers in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland.
The biggest metropolitan region in Germany has 5.8 million residents, and more than one in five of them are living below the poverty line.
North Rhine-Westphalia, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, and Berlin all had higher than average poverty rates, while Bremen lagged far behind with a rate of 28.1%, according to the survey.
“The number one issue zone in terms of poverty policy,” the group said of the Ruhr area.
Jessica Tatti, a left-labor policymaker, said that the government should do something about poverty in the nation.
In order to help those on a “limited budget,” she advocated for a tax on corporate earnings.
It is government taxation, say the Social Democrats, Greens, and liberal Free Democrats (FDP) of Germany, that are to blame for the country’s poverty rate.
FDP social specialist Pascal Kober said, “In this financially stressful circumstances, we must let people collect more of their hard-earned money.”
