A well-working system? Germany only has an income tax but no wealth tax, unsurprisingly there's a huge inequality in wealth. If you earn your living in Germany through work you are basically a sucker: You have to hand on average 38.9% to the state. Taxation on capital gains, interest and dividends is 25%. This difference is compounding every year so the net effect over a lifetime is huge.
It's comparable to the US. If you look at the roster of billionaires in Germany, and then look at their national median wealth figures, it's stark.
Klause-Michel Kuehne scaled from Germany's economic size to the US economic size would go from $37b in wealth to $195b. That's Jeff Bezos.
Dieter Schwarz scaled similarly would go from $26b to $135b. That's Bill Gates.
Susanne Klatten scaled similarly would go from $24.6b to $128b. That's Zuckerberg.
Thomas and Andreas Struengmann scaled similarly would each go from $21b to $109b. That's Warren Buffett.
Stefan Quandt scaled similarly would go from $21b to $109b. That's Steve Ballmer.
And so on. Germany has 30 of the top 500 largest individual fortunes globally; the US has 159. Interestingly that's the approximately correct scaling if you account for the difference in economic size (although one would expect it to increase even further with scale, and given the US also has other things in its favor (eg global reserve currency, military superpower); so Germany is more than pulling its weight in relation to the number of US billionaires at the top). Overall Germany had 153 billionaires as recently as 2019, while the US had 788 that year; once again that scales roughly correctly for the difference in economy size.
So yes, the incredible wealth at the top in Germany is every bit as lopsided considering the size of the German economy.
Germany's median wealth figure is below the US. That's despite the US massively debasing its median with tens of millions of poor immigrants from Latin America over the past 40 years (meaning those people are starting from scratch, typically with no valuable labor skills or education background, and often without even knowing English). Comparing apples to apples, US demographics to Germany demographics, US white people are drastically richer than German white people at the median. And it's also despite the US not having the much vaunted labor protection that the Germans enjoy.
Germany, given its immense economic output, relatively stable culture and politics, high productivity, and strong labor protection, should have extraordinary wealth at the median. It doesn't (France and Britain both far exceed Germany in that regard; Germany is only slightly ahead of Portugal by comparison).
By well-working system I mean there are still enough checks and balances in place to make the rise of a figure like Trump or Putin very unlikely. And this of course is tied to economic well-being.
Well, they could use a term limit for chancellors. The position is not as powerful as the US president (the term limit is really the most important check to the president's power), and most people will agree that Merkel did at least a decent job during her tenure, but long office terms tend to fossilize the political system.
