Designed digital minister: Civil service instead of free economy: Manager becomes minister

It is a fist-thick surprise: with the head of the electronics chain MediaMarktsatur, Karsten Wildberger, a non-party business manager changes to the federal cabinet to take over the office of digital minister at the request of CDU boss Friedrich Merz. The 55-year-old knows Merz about the CDU’s economic council, whose Vice President is. The CDU politicians Philipp Amthor and Thomas Jarzombek are to support him as parliamentary state secretaries.

The department for digitization and state modernization has been newly created, so far digitization has been more of an appendix of the Ministry of Transport. “I feel honored about the trust that Friedrich Merz puts in me and the opportunity to become the new Minister for Digital,” explains the Gießener and her doctorate. “Digitization and technology were formative topics of my professional career, and the new ministry will play a crucial role in the modernization of our country.”

Vita of the Minister-in-Spe

The former management consultant worked as a manager at Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, in 2012 he moved to the Australian telecommunications company Telstra in 2012. In 2016 he came back to Germany and became a member of the board at the energy group Eon.

He has been head of the MediaMarktsatur and its umbrella company Ceconomy since 2021. His balance sheet is positive: Ceconomy has had eight growth quartals in a row, from an old -fashioned branch list has become a dealer with a strong website. If the online sales share before corona pandemic was 15 percent, it is now 24 percent.

Reactions sometimes behave, sometimes positive

“Wildberger knows how a company comes out of the crisis thanks to digitization,” says an industry expert who does not want to be named. “But his switch to civil service bothers risks – he has to dust off authorities, he is not politically networked and has no experience in the state apparatus.” It can be heard from authorities that a man from outside could bring a breath of fresh air. “But hopefully he knows that a ministry will lead differently than a company in the free economy.”

From the point of view of the digital expert Anke Domscheit-Berg, who was sitting for the left in the Bundestag, this point is also a chance and risk. “Mr. Wildberger cannot go through in a manager manner from above – then he would only get a bloody nose and fail on the state apparatus.” He also had to convince the other federal ministries, the federal authorities, the federal states and the Bundestag in order to successfully push changes.

Domscheit -Berg admits that this will not always work in consensus – in her view, it would be important to equip the first Federal Digital Minister with hard skills for binding requirements. The backing by the Chancellor will also be decisive.

Domscheit-Berg describes the projects to digitize administrative processes consistently and to standardize the federal government’s IT as a “mammoth task”. “We need uniform standards and open source applications of the authorities-in reality and no more than pure lip service.”

The digital association Bitkom evaluates the appeal positively, but also indicates the importance of the exact, previously unexplained responsibilities of the Federal Ministry of the Federal Department. “More than ever, we now have to become competitive, innovative and digitally able to act: to get the economy going, to strengthen social cohesion, to improve security in the cyber space and to bring the state up to date,” says Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst.

Digitization not yet bundled

The responsibilities for digitization have so far been distributed to various departments and federal authorities in the federal government, and central skills are to be bundled in the future. How exactly this should look like is still unclear.

Some examples: The Federal Ministry of the Interior has so far taken care of the digitization of the administration. The network expansion is the responsibility of the Ministry of Digital and Transport. Data protection is the responsibility of the federal and state data protection authorities, and artificial intelligence is partly located at the Ministry of Research and partly with the Ministry of Economic Affairs.