The Demise of the “German Dream,” or Why Are Smart People Fleeing Germany?

Europe is no longer the center of the world. What we see in Germany today is not a temporary difficulty, but the systematic dismantling of the prosperity we have grown accustomed to. While politicians discuss charts, the country’s intellectual core is voting with its feet.

More than 270 000 citizens leave Germany every year (it is worth noting that the figures apply only to German citizens. In addition, more than 1 million non-citizen residents left the country in 2024).
75% of those leaving are people with higher education: engineers, scientists, doctors.
24 000 bankruptcies in 2025. (Although France leads in bankruptcies, with 66 thousand recorded in 2025). When giants such as Volkswagen or ZF shut down, it is not just a factory that collapses—the myth of German stability collapses too.

Why are our specialists leaving?
Russian-speaking professionals (IT, medicine, engineering) who came in pursuit of the German dream in the 2010s are now packing their bags en masse. The reasons are obvious:
A tax dead end, where you hand over 42-45% of your income to the state amid a stagnant economy and rampant inflation.
The industrial sector is losing thousands of jobs. High-quality, well-paid vacancies are disappearing forever.
Against the backdrop of Asia’s and the UAE’s digital hubs, Germany looks like a museum of paper-based technology, complete with its bureaucracy.

Where are the brains and money flowing?
If all roads once led to Berlin or Munich, professionals now choose the UAE or return to the CIS.

Germany is becoming a textbook example of lost competitiveness. Low unemployment today is not a sign of health, but the result of a demographic trough. There is no one to work, and those who know how to create no longer want to pay for this quiet collapse out of their own pockets.
The Western world is no longer the exclusive owner of the right to succeed. We are entering an era in which growth and dynamism thrive where business is free, not where subsidies and taxes go on endlessly.