To Whom God Gives an Office…

I. The Proverb and Its Decay

"To whom God gives an office, He also gives the brains" – so goes an old German proverb that was already meant ironically in the Baroque era. It was never intended as a statement of fact, but as a pious wish, a whispered prayer from those who suffered under incompetent authorities. The hope was: Somehow the Good Lord will deliver what was forgotten during the appointment.

Four hundred years later, one must conclude: God has stopped delivering. Or more precisely: the orders are no longer being forwarded to Him. For the allocation of ministerial posts in the Federal Republic of Germany has long followed its own theology, in which expertise serves at best as a decorative accessory – like a handsome tie on a poorly fitting suit.

II. The Golden Era: When Ministers Still Knew Their Field

There was a time when filling a ministerial post was not primarily a matter of party arithmetic, but a matter of competence. When Konrad Adenauer assembled his first cabinet in 1949, he brought in Ludwig Erhard as Minister of Economics – a PhD economist who, as Director of the Administration for Economics, had already pushed through the currency reform and who would later go down in history as the "father of the economic miracle." Erhard was an economist before he became Economics Minister. Not the other way around.

Karl Schiller, who took over the economics portfolio under Kiesinger in 1966, was a full professor of economics and had already tested his theoretical concepts in practice as Hamburg's Senator for Economics. His "Magic Square" of economic policy was not a campaign slogan but a carefully conceived framework of economic governance. When Helmut Schmidt became Defence Minister in 1969, he brought not only his time as Hamburg's Interior Senator, where he had proved himself as a crisis manager during the catastrophic North Sea flood of 1962 – he was also a reserve officer with a genuine understanding of military structures.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher shaped German foreign policy as Foreign Minister for eighteen years – he had learned his craft from the ground up, first as Interior Minister, then as chief diplomat. When Genscher spoke about East-West relations, it was not because he had read a briefing paper, but because he had mastered the subject.

III. The Creeping Decline

The decay did not come overnight. It came in waves, each a little more brazen than the last. Under Helmut Kohl, the systematic confusion of party loyalty with governing capability began. Ministers were chosen less for what they could do than for whom they represented: the right state association, the right party wing, the right gender, the right denomination. The cabinet became a mirror of party statistics rather than a team of competence.

Under Angela Merkel, this system was perfected. The cabinet became a political equation: two women from the East, one CSU man from Upper Bavaria, one representative of the labour wing, one token Protestant. Professional expertise? If it happened to fit, all the better. If not, no matter – that's what state secretaries are for.

Under the traffic-light coalition, the principle reached a new level. A PhD-holding trampoline athlete as Defence Minister, a children's book author as Economics Minister, a lawyer with no foreign policy experience whatsoever as the nation's chief diplomat – cabinet formation increasingly resembled a parlour game in which portfolios are distributed by lot.

IV. The Merz Cabinet: Anatomy of a Bankruptcy

One might have hoped that the Merz government, launched on 6 May 2025 with the declared ambition of taking "Responsibility for Germany," would at least tentatively return to the old principle of expertise. Friedrich Merz himself, a lawyer and former corporate attorney with BlackRock experience, had invoked "performance" and "competence" throughout the election campaign.

What he then delivered was the usual – only with an even thicker layer of irony.

More than half of the cabinet members have no prior experience in government – including the Chancellor and his Vice Chancellor. Five of the ten CDU/CSU ministers are lawyers. And the allocation of individual portfolios reads like an experiment in organised unfamiliarity with the subject matter:

Nina Warken becomes Health Minister. Her qualifications? She is a lawyer, was parliamentary whip and CDU General Secretary in Baden-Württemberg. With health policy she had, as the Chancellor-designate himself freely admitted, "nothing to do." In the coalition negotiations she sat in the working group on Internal Affairs, Law and Migration. But she comes from the Young Union, has the Women's Union behind her, and the powerful state association of Baden-Württemberg. That suffices.

Patrick Schnieder takes over the Transport Ministry. A lawyer from Bitburg-Prüm whose transport policy experience is limited to presumably having driven regularly over potholes as a county councillor. A quarter century on the county council, county chairman, head of the Rhineland-Palatinate state group in the Bundestag – a man of the grassroots, undoubtedly. But a Transport Minister?

Verena Hubertz becomes Housing Minister. The 37-year-old has been in the Bundestag since 2021 and previously founded the cooking startup "Kitchen Stories." She understands as much about housing construction and urban development as about any other subject she has been speed-reading since entering parliament.

V. The Real Selection Criteria

Anyone who wants to understand cabinet formation must know the actual list of criteria by which ministers are selected. It reads, in descending order of importance:

First: State association. Lower Saxony felt "passed over" in the Merz cabinet and protested loudly. Baden-Württemberg and Schleswig-Holstein each received two ministries – not because the better minds reside there, but because the arithmetic of power demanded it.

Second: Gender. Eight female ministers and nine male ministers, plus the Chancellor – the quota must be right. This is not emancipatory progress; it is personnel planning by reproductive anatomy rather than by intellectual capacity.

Third: Party wing. CDA chairman Dennis Radtke complained that "no representative of the Christian-social root" sat in the cabinet – something that "from Adenauer to Merkel had never happened." His complaint, notably, was not about missing expertise, but about missing wing representation.

Fourth: Loyalty. Chief of Staff Thorsten Frei is considered "one of the closest confidants" of Merz. That is his primary qualification for the most powerful coordinating office in the Republic.

Fifth, if there's room left: Professional competence. The positive exception in the Merz cabinet is Katherina Reiche as Economics Minister, who as a former parliamentary state secretary and CEO of the E.ON subsidiary Westenergie actually brings business experience. That she was promptly attacked by the Left Party as an "E.ON lobbyist" is telling: anyone who actually understands the subject becomes suspect.

VI. The Defence of Incompetence

The standard defence runs: "Ministers are not case workers but leaders." A t-online commentator formulated it thus with great conviction, and he is not entirely wrong. A Health Minister need not be able to perform surgery. But he should know what a DRG system is before taking responsibility for hospital reform.

In the private sector, the idea would be absurd: to have an automobile corporation led by someone who has never seen the inside of a car, on the grounds that "leadership skills matter more than technical expertise." A Siemens CEO without technical understanding? A hospital director without medical knowledge? Unthinkable. But in a ministerial office, where billions of euros and millions of lives are at stake, it apparently suffices to be "disciplined, team-oriented and loyal."

The second line of defence goes: "That's what the state secretaries are for." For Nina Warken, these are Tino Sorge and Georg Kippels – both on the Health Committee since 2013. So the expertise sits one floor down. The minister herself is the decorative figurehead who reads out sentences at press conferences that others have written. That this is communicated so openly, without anyone feeling ashamed, shows the advanced state of the decay.

VII. What Is Lost

The difference is not merely quantitative; it is qualitative. When a minister commands his subject, he can judge whether the proposals his apparatus presents to him make sense. He can formulate counter-arguments, think of alternatives, see through lobbyists. A minister without domain knowledge is at the mercy of his apparatus. He becomes a signature machine who occasionally recites sentences at press conferences.

Worse still: a minister without domain knowledge cannot set priorities. He does not know which of the hundred construction sites is the most urgent, which reform has the greatest leverage, which compromise is acceptable and which destroys the substance. He navigates blind – and the results after eight months of the Merz cabinet confirm it. Health reform is stalled, the Chancellor himself rates the nursing care reform paper as "not satisfactory," health insurance contributions are rising. The mood in the country is dire.

VIII. The Lawyers' Republic

A special chapter is owed to the dominance of lawyers in the cabinet. Five of the ten CDU/CSU ministers studied law: Wadephul, Frei, Schnieder, Warken and Prien. The Chancellor himself is a lawyer. Together with the SPD lawyers in the cabinet, the picture emerges of a government dominated by a single academic discipline.

This has tradition. But tradition is no justification. A lawyer learns to interpret statutes. He does not learn how an economy functions, how a healthcare system is organised, how to manage an energy transition, or how to build digital infrastructure. The over-representation of lawyers in politics is a symptom of the fact that the long march through party structures – local branch, county council, state parliament, Bundestag – favours a particular type of person: the rhetorically trained generalist without deep expertise in any subject other than party bylaws.

What is missing: engineers, natural scientists, physicians, computer scientists, economists with practical experience. People who know how things work – not merely how to talk about them.

IX. The International Comparison

In other countries, the matter is by no means so self-evident. When Emmanuel Macron formed his first cabinet in 2017, he brought in Nicolas Hulot as Environment Minister – a man who had devoted half his life to environmental protection. Jean-Yves Le Drian brought years of experience on the Defence Committee and as a leading regional politician to the Defence Ministry.

In the Scandinavian countries, which regularly top international governance rankings, professional suitability is a self-evident criterion in cabinet formation. Not the only one, but a weighty one. In Germany, it has been relegated to a luxury criterion – a "nice to have" that is invoked only when all other equations have been solved.

X. The System as Root Cause

The cause lies in the system itself. Cabinet formation in Germany is a turf war between party organisations, not a talent search. The coalition agreement first divides portfolios by party – CDU gets six ministries plus the Chancellery, CSU three, SPD seven – and then the haggling over personnel begins within each party. Who has a claim? Who has earned merit? Who still needs to be accommodated?

In this process, the question "Who can do this best?" comes structurally too late. It arrives only after the fundamental decisions have already been made. First the office is awarded, then it is checked whether the brains were delivered along with it. Exactly as the old proverb describes – only that today no one hopes for divine supplementary delivery any more. Instead, they hope for the state secretaries.

XI. What Ought to Be Done

The solution would be as simple as it is politically impossible: one would need to turn cabinet formation on its head. First define the problems, then seek the best minds for the problems, then – and only then – adjust the intra-party arithmetic. But this will not happen, because it contradicts the power interests of the parties. The parties award ministerial posts as rewards for loyalty, as appeasement of regional claims, as severance for defeated rivals. The ministry as a substantive task does not feature in this logic.

So what remains? Perhaps only the recognition that the proverb must be rewritten. No longer "To whom God gives an office, He also gives the brains," but, more honestly:

Whether that is enough to steer a nation of 84 million people through recession, energy transition, digital transformation, demographic upheaval and geopolitical turmoil is another question. Ludwig Erhard, the PhD economist from Fürth who became Economics Minister in 1949 with fifteen years of research experience, would probably have taken the cigar out of his mouth and said something unkind.