German call for English to be second official language amid labour shortage

English should become a second official language at administrative offices in Germany, one of the country’s governing parties has argued, saying unwieldy bureaucratic German is proving too much of a deterrent for much-needed skilled workers from abroad.

The three-party government of the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in which the pro-business Free Democratic party (FDP) is a junior coalition partner, last autumn unveiled its own version of a “green card” – called Chancenkarte or “opportunity card” – designed to address a critical shortage of skilled labour.

“Skilled workers who want to come to Germany should be able to successfully apply for our new points-based ‘green card’ scheme from abroad even if they don’t yet speak fluent German,” Johannes Vogel of the FDP told the Guardian.

Vogel, a member of the Bundestag’s committee for labour and social affairs, said the new green card system needed to be designed in such a way as to make it possible for applicants to qualify even if they were not fluent in German.

“And the offices where they have to register once these workers are here should be able to offer them English application forms and caseworkers who are fluent in English,” he added.

As the German economy cranked back into gear after pandemic standstills last year, it recorded an annual average of 844,000 job vacancies in 2022, a record, with desperate shortages especially in the pharmaceutical, engineering and IT sectors. In January this year, the Federal Employment Agency recorded 764,326 vacancies at German businesses.

The head of the agency, Andrea Nahles, suggested last November that Europe’s largest economy would need an annual intake of about 400,000 skilled workers from abroad to fill the gap.

“Germany needs to get better at competing for global talents. Our economic future depends on it,” said Vogel. “We have a competitive disadvantage because German, alas, is not a global language. At the very least, we should compensate for that.”

The FDP’s call has been echoed by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, whose president, Peter Adrian, recently told Münchner Merkur newspaper: “English is the world language and should suffice for anyone to achieve great things in many German businesses.” Adrian said it would be a “strong signal” if people from across were able to have their first contact with German bureaucracy in a language other than German.

The idea, first floated by the FDP when it entered government in December 2021, has been rejected by the organisation responsible for those working in administrative offices. “When it comes to ordinances and laws, the official language in this country applies for reasons of legal certainty, and that is German,” a spokesperson for the Civil Servants’ Association (DBB) told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland last year.

Ulrich Stock, a DBB official from the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, warned that adding a second official language would create a “bureaucratic monster” and come with legal risks.

Resistance to such a change has been noticeably more vocal in the former states of the socialist German Democratic Republic, where a sizeable part of the population grew up learning Russian rather than English as a first foreign language at school.

Raymond Walk, a member of the Thuringian state parliament for the conservative CDU, told Der Spiegel that learning German had to remain the “central key” to the integration of people into German society.

In its latest English-language proficiency index, the education company EF Education First lists Germany in the “very high” category, but below other northern European countries in Scandinavia and the Benelux union.