Publication on Social Welfare Sanctions and Child Poverty in Germany

The German Federal Employment Agency reports that sanctions against welfare recipients have doubled over two years, reaching 461,000 cases. These penalties, imposed for missed appointments or rejected measures, significantly reduce subsistence-level benefits. While the agency attributes the increase to consistent application of unchanged rules, critics argue this represents a troubling shift where social law increasingly resembles punitive criminal law. The publication highlights how this enforcement disproportionately impacts children, contrasting it with insufficient recovery of funds from major financial scandals like Cum-Ex. This analysis appears in the current issue of Freitag magazine.