Germany has a booze problem — or does it?

As Berlin debates higher alcohol taxes, the press blames cheap beer for a national crisis.

Dear Reader,

You could almost hear the astonishment in the journalist’s mouth as she typed the words into her keyboard. “Less alcohol is imbibed in Russia and the United Kingdom than here in Germany, even though the people of those countries have a reputation for uncontrolled drinking habits,” Der Spiegel noted in a recent article.

The shock runs deep. It turns out that the Brits, with their love of a Saturday-night binge, and the Russians, who allegedly sleep with a bottle of vodka under their pillow, are actually more sober than Germans.

In fact, almost everyone in Europe has brought their drinking habits under control in recent years, leaving only Romania and a few small Baltic states with worse hangovers than the Teutons.

Photo by BENCE BOROS on Unsplash

The culprit, Germany’s media unanimously agree, is the state. Figures released last month show that Germany has the cheapest alcohol prices in the entire EU except for Italy. A bottle of booze in Finland costs one and a half times what it does here. The Nordic country has introduced extreme alcohol pricing. But the majority of EU states tax alcohol to the extent that it is 30 to 60 per cent more expensive than in Germany.

Germany is so relaxed about alcohol pricing that wine is not even subject to a sin tax — it is hit only with normal VAT. The result is that a good-quality Riesling is available in your local supermarket for as little as six euros. Beer is subject to its own tax, but this is so low that it adds only around five cents to the cost of a 500ml bottle.

Spirits are subject to a somewhat higher levies. But I am still always surprised to find that I pay less for a bottle of whisky in Germany than I do in my native Scotland.

A spate of articles has appeared in the German media in recent weeks pointing out the embarrassing fact that Germans still enjoy a drink a little too much for the tastes of the fuddy-duddies who work for bourgeois broadsheets. Responsible for this drinking crisis, the puritan press claim, is a government that has failed to clamp down on this evil vice.

“The whole of Germany has an alcohol problem,” screeched the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Almost everyone suffers directly or indirectly from the government doing too little to protect the population from alcohol and its sometimes devastating consequences.”

“The economic, health and social consequences of this indecisive alcohol policy are monstrous,” the newspaper complained.

It was amid this new prohibitionist clamour that a report by the Federal Doctors’ Association found that alcohol was costing the health system €57 billion a year, while the state was recouping just €3 billion in taxes to pay for that bill. It is not just heavy drinkers who are weighing down the health system: people who regularly drink alcohol struggle with weight issues and sleeping problems, experts assured the press.

The federal government may now be about to respond. A joint initiative by health spokespeople for both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats has proposed hiking the alcohol tax — despite the fact that the CDU pledged not to increase it during coalition talks last year.

Christos Pantazis, health policy spokesman for the SPD, claimed that international experience has shown that a moderate increase in alcohol prices reduces risky consumption among young people and heavy drinkers.

Tax rates on alcohol have hardly been adjusted for years and no longer have any dampening effect, Pantazis said. “A key instrument of prevention remains unused,” he told the told the Rheinische Post.

The press have been busily interviewing experts who assure them that a 10 per cent hike in alcohol prices will reduce consumption by six per cent. The media love to cite the example of Lithuania, which jacked up its alcohol tax in 2017 and has allegedly witnessed a miraculous 32 per cent decrease in consumption. (Funnily enough, a brief look at the WHO statistics shows that the drop in consumption in Lithuania came before 2017, after which it actually increased somewhat.)

The case of Italy — the only country with cheaper booze than Germany — is also left out of the wonderfully sober reporting on this issue. At the start of the century, Italy had the same level of consumption as high-tax Finland — now it is lower.

When it comes to vice taxes, it is all the rage to cite some spurious correlation as proof that something you find objectionable should be pushed out of public view.

Here is one that receives rather less attention.

Over the past ten years, alcohol consumption has dropped by 10 per cent in Germany. A staggering 40 per cent of Gen Z do not drink any alcohol, with most citing health reasons. This change in drinking habits correlates with a rise in distrust in public institutions and the growing popularity of radical political parties.

I have a theory about the cause of this correlation. We humans are suckers for a vice. Despite the best efforts of the new puritans, one bad habit will simply be replaced by another. If getting drunk on a weekday in a room full of strangers has been replaced by doom-scrolling alone on a digital device until we believe in QAnon, then beer may not be the evil it is made out to be.

Personally, my own drinking habit puts me somewhere around the German average, which is a little over half a litre of beer a day. That quantity, I should point out, is only partly about pleasure. It is also based on trusted medical advice. My grandfather, a Bavarian family doctor, used to advise patients who came to him with sleeping problems to drink a glass of beer before going to bed. That was advice he put into daily practice himself — until he died at the ripe old age of 99.

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News in Brief

• Police in Heilbronn have opened an investigation into a pensioner who called Friedrich Merz “Pinocchio” in a social media post. The probe was launched under Germany’s much-criticised public insult laws, which criminalise disparaging remarks about politicians. The legislation drew international attention in 2024 when a Bavarian retiree had his house raided after calling then vice-chancellor Robert Habeck an “idiot”. The latest case has prompted particular backlash because even leading figures in the Green party have previously use the “Pinocchio” jibe to describe Merz.

• The nepotism scandal inside the AfD is gathering pace. For weeks, senior AfD lawmakers in Saxony-Anhalt have been accusing one another of charging private trips to the taxpayer or employing family members on generous publicly funded salaries. As more figures become embroiled, party leader Alice Weidel has attempted to push one of her deputies — Bundestag lawmaker Stefan Keuter — to resign over allegations that he secured a publicly funded job for his girlfriend in his parliamentary office. Allegations of misappropriation of public funds have also surfaced among AfD lawmakers in Lower Saxony.

• Germany’s public broadcasters are facing accusations of GDR-style manipulation of video footage on their flagship evening news programmes. ARD — channel one on most viewers’ television sets — aired footage of Angela Merkel applauding Friedrich Merz at the CDU party conference over the weekend after he was re-elected party leader, despite Merkel having left the venue hours earlier. ZDF — channel two — broadcast footage it claimed showed ICE raids in the United States that in fact depicted the arrest of a suspected school shooter four years ago. Both broadcasters insist the incidents were innocent mistakes. Critics see something more deliberate: an attempt to manipulate public opinion in favour of the old political establishment.