Cost of living tops Germans' fears as anxiety about inflation hits 59%

Walk into a German living room in the fall of 2026 and you will not hear much talk about wars or climate catastrophe or the American president. You will hear about the price of electricity. The rent. What groceries cost now compared to last month. This is what Germans fear most, and the gap between that fear and everything else is widening.

The R+V insurance company has been asking Germans what keeps them awake at night since the early 1990s. The survey is methodical: between May and July of this year, researchers spoke with roughly 2,400 German-speaking adults aged fourteen and older. The results, presented in Berlin in early October, tell a story of a country preoccupied with the immediate and material.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents named the rising cost of living as their greatest worry. That is up from 52 percent the year before. The climb is not abstract. Energy bills have jumped. Housing has become more expensive. Food prices have climbed. For millions of people, this means less money left over for anything beyond the essentials—no vacation, no new furniture, no buffer. Isabelle Borucki, a political scientist from Marburg who consulted on the study, put it plainly: people can afford less and less. The financial room to move has shrunk.

But the cost of living is only part of what is eating at Germans. The country's social security systems are in crisis. The state pension fund runs chronically in the red. Long-term care insurance does the same. Germans understand this. They know that taxes will rise and benefits may shrink. The fear of higher taxes has grown stronger than in previous years. What troubles people most, Borucki explained, is the question of fairness underneath it all—who will pay for modernization, and can they still count on the benefits they have earned? There is a deeper anxiety here about whether the social contract still holds.

Yet when you look at what dominates German headlines, something curious emerges. Fifty-two percent of those surveyed worry that refugees are overwhelming the state, placing immigration concerns third on the list of fears. But global upheavals barely register. Only 45 percent fear that Donald Trump's policies are making the world more dangerous. During his first term in 2018, 69 percent said the same thing. After years of constant geopolitical alarm, Grischa Brower-Rabinowitsch, another researcher on the study, observed, people are simply getting used to it. The anxiety has worn thin.

The same pattern holds elsewhere. Only 34 percent now fear a war involving Germany, down from 41 percent a year ago. Job security anxiety has fallen to 20 percent among the working population—the lowest figure in the survey's history. Germans, it seems, are looking toward the future with considerably less dread than might be expected given the headlines.

But there is one area where confidence has collapsed. When asked to grade politicians on a scale where one is excellent and six is failing, respondents gave an average score of 4.1—barely passing. The government that came to power in May 2025, a coalition of the conservative Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, arrived with promises of strong leadership, less infighting, and economic recovery. None of that has materialized, Borucki said. The gap between what was promised and what has been delivered has widened. People are disappointed. They are losing faith in those who lead them.

This is the shape of German anxiety in 2026: not fear of the world ending, but the steady, grinding worry that the cost of living will keep rising, that the systems meant to protect them are breaking, and that the people in charge have no real answers. It is a fear rooted in the everyday, and it is only growing.