Members of the German Bundestag have ordered 1,670 smartphones and tablets in 2025 at a cost of nearly €1.5 million to the public purse, with a striking surge in purchases just before Christmas.
The Bundestag administration confirmed that deputies acquired 950 iPhones, 420 iPads, 257 Samsung smartphones and 43 Samsung tablets via the Sachleistungskonto (material resources account) held by each of the 630 members of parliament.
The total came to €1,464,567, according to administration figures first reported by Bild.
That works out at roughly 2.6 devices per MP over the course of the year. Over a regular four-year legislative period, that would be more than 10 smartphones or tablets per parliamentarian.
In the final quarter alone, 43.5 per cent of all devices were ordered, including 402 iPhones and 191 iPads worth almost €550,000.
Insiders have long described it as an open secret that remaining budgets on the MPs’ expense accounts are routinely exhausted at year-end. The pattern has its own name in German, Dezemberfieber, or December fever.
Bundestag staff have told Bild that devices are frequently passed on to spouses, children, partners or party associates as seasonal gifts.
One long-serving office manager told Bild: “It is known among employees that in some cases smartphones, after short use or as new devices, are given to relatives or third parties.”
Estimates cited by the paper put the annual value of devices billed without serving an exclusively official purpose at about €270,000.
Bund der Steuerzahler (German Taxpayers’ Association) president Rainer Holznagel criticised the system for inviting abuse.
“The expense account encourages blatant misuse,” he said, adding that the Christmas period appears to trigger a particular “gift fever” in some offices.
He called for the current allowances to be scrapped and replaced by a fully taxable, consolidated system, merging the material resources account, the tax-free expenses allowance and members’ salaries into a single taxable payment.
The Bundestag administration has pushed back, noting that many new MPs entered parliament after the last election and needed to equip their offices.
A spokesman insisted all purchases undergo scrutiny, “even the Ikea shelves” used as bookcases, and attributed the spike partly to the post-election influx of first-time deputies.
Munich-based ifo Institute for Economic Research specialists were unable to find the total amount of social benefits people received in Germany due to the high number of benefits. https://t.co/L9B4fYPO9u
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 15, 2025
