Germany's government slashes its economic growth forecast for this year to 0.3% The German government on Wednesday slashed its 2025 growth forecast for the country's economy, Europe's biggest, to just 0.3% after it shrank for two consecutive years.
Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who is also Germany's economy minister, said in a statement that “the global crises of recent years have hit our industry- and export-oriented economy particularly hard,” although an energy crunch was headed off after Russia's full-scale invasion and inflation has fallen.
Germany has managed no meaningful economic growth in the past four years as it has struggled to deal with major shifts in the global economy and with structural challenges of its own.
It is being held seven months before it was originally scheduled after Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party coalition collapsed in November in a dispute about how to revitalize the economy.
The new projection is much lower than the government's previous forecast of 1.1% growth, issued in October.
