The City Council met: How much money do the federal and state governments actually owe the City of Leipzig?

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On 2 July, a question was also raised at the council meeting regarding the call that the Left Party group has been persistently raising since August 2025. And, in fact, Torsten Bonew, the councillor responsible for finance, had intended to provide a comprehensive answer to this question this July. However, since his department has been looking into the matter in depth, it has become increasingly clear why it was allowed to go on for so long that Leipzig carried out and paid for so many mandatory tasks imposed by the federal government, without the federal government even thinking to provide the necessary funding for these tasks. For that is precisely what is causing Leipzig to slide ever deeper into debt.

And in autumn 2025, Finance Councillor Torsten Bonew still believed that responding to the Left Party’s parliamentary question

would be quite simple: You simply ask all the departments for their figures and then you have a total of what the City of Leipzig spends on these mandatory tasks. You then offset this against the money provided by the federal and state governments. And there you have the difference.

Fat chance. Even the first rough tables published by the Finance Department in the autumn basically showed that not even the departments and divisions concerned knew how big the gap was between the actual costs and the funds from the federal and state governments. The Left Party parliamentary group simply stated that the tables were of no use whatsoever.

So the question went back through the procedure, and Torsten Bonew meanwhile set a few deadlines by which he intended to present the full accounts. But when he looked into the matter himself in more detail, he too realised: this won’t work.

Since no one had ever requested these specific figures before, the local authorities did not have a template into which the figures could simply be entered. A systematic approach had to be developed from scratch in order to get to the bottom of these hidden discrepancies.

That is why Torsten Bonew then effectively designated two departments as a pilot project and, working with them, developed a questionnaire that actually brought the city’s hidden additional costs to light. This came as just as much of a surprise to the two departments as it did to the mayor responsible for finance.

Leipzig is breaking new ground

He was then available to answer questions on 2 July when Left Party city councillor Enrico Stange raised the matter once again. By now, he was already quite weary of the subject. Because, of course, it’s exhausting to keep asking the same questions for a whole year whilst the city’s financial situation continues to deteriorate.

Leipzig has even enquired with other cities of comparable size to see whether they have a similar calculation of the costs that the federal government simply does not reimburse. But even Mayor Burkhard Jung had to admit: no such calculation exists anywhere yet.

Leipzig has actually launched a pioneering project here, which would normally have been a proper research commission for the Institute of Finance at the University of Leipzig, Bonew remarked.

This research work has now had to be carried out by the City of Leipzig’s departments and, above all, by two officials from the Finance Department. And it certainly looks as though Bonew’s department has now actually developed a working framework with which this enquiry can be rolled out across all 60 of the city’s departments.

New target: autumn

This is in addition to the work on the 2027/2028 two-year budget, which has long since begun, as Bonew noted. But he, too, admits that the figure the Left Party parliamentary group was actually seeking is important. For then Leipzig would be the first city in Germany to be able to account to the federal government, down to the last Heller and Pfennig, for the costs that the federal government has virtually secretly imposed on the local authority without providing full funding.

As an ordinary taxpayer, one thinks: that really shouldn’t be possible. Surely the city should be able to claim back every mandatory service it provides from the federal government on a one-to-one basis. But that is precisely not the case.

Figures from the city’s social report
suggest that the sum which the federal government has failed to fully fund has long been in the region of 1 billion euros.

That is a sum which completely swallows up the city’s own tax revenue. The result is precisely the effect that everyone has been observing for the past two years: Leipzig’s budgets are sliding deep into the red. In order to be able to invest at all, Leipzig has to take on 200 to 300 million euros in debt.

Every year. Or drastically cut back on its investment programmes. And the city council no longer has any room for manoeuvre at all. Instead of passing resolutions, it is now issuing appeals to the federal government
to finally restore the local authorities’ financial capacity to act.

In any case, according to Torsten Bonew, he will not be able to present the promised breakdown to the Left Party group in July. That will take a while longer. But he hopes to finally have the figures together by autumn.

Figures that are likely to be of interest to mayors far beyond Leipzig. If so, Leipzig is likely to be the first city in Germany to be able to calculate exactly how federal policy is burdening towns and local authorities with tasks that, in the end, are only half-funded.