Germany's Government Wants to Kill Its Own Transparency Law

What Got Slipped Into the Fine Print

Here's the thing about 34-point reform packages: most people only read the headline. Chancellor Friedrich Merz was practically beaming when he announced the package, telling reporters, "These reforms are meant to get Germany back on track." Nobody was supposed to look too hard at item 34.

According to DW, buried near the bottom of the list is a proposal to significantly amend Germany's Freedom of Information Act, known as the IFG, which has been on the books since 2006. The IFG gives every person the legal right to demand official information from federal agencies, and it is the backbone of accountability journalism, environmental advocacy, and consumer protection work across the country. Critics are not mincing words: they say the coalition's plan would effectively abolish it.

The 'Security Threat' Excuse

The ruling coalition of Merz's CDU/CSU bloc and the center-left SPD is not framing this as an attack on transparency, of course. They are framing it as a necessary response to global cyberwarfare and hacker attacks. The reform paper specifically cites the need to protect government data during "times of highly complex threats, both domestic and foreign." Very ominous. Very convenient.

What does that mean in practice? DW reports that under the proposed changes, only "natural persons" would retain the right to file information requests, which would cut off NGOs, advocacy groups, and news organizations entirely. Fees for requests, currently free or minimal, could jump dramatically. The names of government employees could be redacted wholesale to protect them from "hostility and threats." And the government says it wants to explore limiting these rights to German and EU citizens only, locking out everyone else.

So to recap: fewer people can ask, it costs more to ask, you get less back when you do ask, and the government has pre-loaded a dozen justifications to refuse. But sure, this is about cybersecurity.

110 Organizations Sign On to Tell Them No

The backlash was fast and it was loud. An open letter signed by 110 civil society organizations told the government in no uncertain terms: "Stop these plans! Protect the Freedom of Information Act and freedom of information in its current form."

The letter continued: "Anyone who limits the right to access information to individual cases, subjects it to mandatory justification, excludes organizations and raises fees without warning to exorbitant levels is effectively abolishing freedom of information." That is not the language of groups willing to wait and see how the reforms shake out in committee.

Martin Kaiser, a climate expert with Greenpeace, told DW exactly what is at stake in practical terms. "If the federal government now wants to curtail the right to information, it will hinder oversight and public participation and reduce public acceptance regarding infrastructure, land use, species conservation and climate protection," he said. "This does not build trust; it creates new mistrust."

Even SPD Members Are Pumping the Brakes

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting. The criticism has been fierce enough that members of the SPD, the junior coalition partner that signed off on this reform package, are now publicly distancing themselves from the transparency provisions. Experts from the SPD's Bundestag committees on Interior, Digital Affairs, and Consumer Protection issued a joint statement, reported by DW, declaring: "Any curtailment of the existing rights of citizens, the press and civil society to access information must not be allowed to proceed."

The SPD parliamentary group went further, stating flatly that it "will not approve any move to abolish the current level of transparency provided by the Freedom of Information Act." So the party that helped pass the reform package is now threatening to block the part of the reform package it apparently did not read carefully enough before passing. German coalition politics is a beautiful disaster.

Green Party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz, who sits on the Parliamentary Oversight Panel for the intelligence services and genuinely knows what legitimately sensitive information looks like, called the whole thing what it is. "Under the pretext of having to adapt to new security threats," he told DW, "they are fundamentally undermining the legal foundations of government transparency."

The Numbers That Make This Worse

Between 2015 and 2022, Germans submitted roughly 105,000 requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bundestag's own figures show that in about 9,000 of those cases, information was denied entirely, and in about 16,200 cases it was partially withheld. That means the vast majority of requests resulted in real information being handed over to real people.

The system was working. That is apparently the problem. When transparency laws actually function, governments start feeling the draft. The answer, in the Merz coalition's view, is apparently to close the window entirely and blame the weather.