AfD on the economy

The AfD wants to protect competition by tightly limiting the business activities of cities and towns. The limits in the Hessian Municipal Code (HGO) should be strictly enforced. The state antitrust authority should also be adequately resourced.

The AfD wants fair competition between companies. Cities and towns should not run many businesses themselves. There are already rules for this. The AfD wants these rules to be followed strictly. The state antitrust office should have enough resources. It checks whether companies have too much power.

In the platform's view, municipalities stretch or exceed the legal limits, for example through spun-off housing companies, tourism promotion, or large-scale kitchens. It says this burdens taxpayers and violates the principle of subsidiarity, meaning private activity should take priority over state activity. The AfD also wants to review the tools used by the state antitrust authority. It commits to the social market economy with free markets and wants to keep cash without restrictions.

The AfD rejects the EU taxonomy and the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). In the party's view, these rules steer companies in a direction the state wants and lead to a kind of planned economy.

The EU has made rules for sustainable business. Companies have to write many reports for this. The AfD is against these rules. It says the state steers companies too much this way. It says this hurts prosperity.

The taxonomy is an EU system that classifies economic activities by how sustainable they are. The platform fears this rating will determine financing costs and later access to credit. The AfD believes companies that do not go along would be pushed out of the market. It also says the reporting duties go beyond social, labor, and environmental law. The party warns of a looming "planned economy 2.0" with losses in prosperity.

The AfD wants broad deregulation, with rules reviewed and scrapped where necessary. Small businesses would be relieved of reporting and statistical duties and of labor-law requirements. The growth in public-sector staff would also be reversed.

The AfD wants fewer rules for companies. Laws that are not needed should go. Small businesses should have to write fewer reports. The administration should get smaller too. This should save money.

The platform cites around 90,000 regulations and laws in Germany that cost about 45 billion euros a year and weigh especially on small and mid-sized companies. Rules would be checked for purpose, cost, and benefit and removed without replacement where warranted; the AfD sees this as the first step in digitalization. It plans initiatives in Hesse and wants to exert influence at the federal level. The number of state employees rose by about 7 percent to nearly 125,000 between 2010 and 2020, and the party wants to reverse that trend.

The AfD wants to check state funding programs systematically for results and cut money for ineffective projects. Independent expert panels should accompany the programs and help decide how grants are awarded.

The state of Hesse pays for many funding programs. The AfD wants to check whether these programs work. Programs that do not work should lose their money. Experts with no party ties should have a say.

In the AfD's view, many programs lack performance reviews, which wastes money. Scientific progress and the needs of citizens and businesses should guide funding, not a steering state. It wants to keep windfall effects in investment subsidies as low as possible. For digitalization, the platform calls for additional grants for software technologies, awarded by panels independent of politics.