Berlin – That should also surprise the Greens: The party is clearly ahead in the electoral favor of civil servants in Germany. This is the result of a survey by the opinion institute Forsa on behalf of the German Association of Officials (dbb).
According to this, 32 percent of civil servants would currently vote for Alliance 90 / The Greens – even though the Greens, with their positions on civil servant status and health insurance, are more likely to meet with rejection from civil servants.
In second place are the CDU / CSU with 28 percent, and the SPD comes far behind with 16 percent. This result differs significantly from the national trend, which currently places the Social Democrats well ahead of the Union – and the Greens only in third place. 1004 representatively selected employees in the public service were surveyed, namely civil servants and collective bargaining employees.
The officials are also rather green about the priorities of important political issues for the next federal government: environmental and climate protection is the most pressing political problem for the respondents. 51 percent see it that way. Then comes school and education policy, followed by coping with the corona pandemic (both 17 percent).
What is most important to them does not differ among civil servants according to status group: Most find good health care (84 percent) particularly important for their own choice, followed by a high-performance education system (83 percent), climate protection (80 percent) and social justice (79 percent). For Ulrich Silberbach, federal chairman of the dbb, this is a clear sign that “people primarily go into the public service to do something for the community and not because of the money and a quick career.”
dbb survey: government employees are disappointed with politics
However, many members of the dbb feel that politicians are overlooking themselves. With 47 percent, almost half of the respondents do not trust any party to stand up for recognition and respect as well as good pay or even the positive development of the public service. Silberbach calls this development worrying. “The state employers have lost a lot of trust here in recent years,” he says.
The dbb boss also sees the alienation between the population and the state as problematic. Since the citizens equate civil servants to a certain extent with the state, this is a real problem. Forsa surveyed selected citizens in 2006 for the dbb survey. After that, their trust in the state fell significantly in 2021 – and with it the popularity of civil servants.
Since 2007, the survey has also been used to determine the reputation of the individual occupational groups among citizens – and not just those in the public service. The firefighters are still at the top of the ranking, followed by the medical staff and the police. The reputation of soldiers as well as IT clerks and pilots has risen. Journalists have slumped again.
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