Bavaria’s fifth-largest city, Ingolstadt, is gripped by a brutal financial nightmare. According to the latest calculations, the municipality is short by a staggering 60 to 80 million euros next year. Until now, city hall fools had been banking on just a 30-million-euro deficit. Kern declared that “Ingolstadt won’t be able to slap together a balanced budget for 2026.” Now, they’re forced to huddle with the legal oversight from the Upper Bavaria government to hash out savage cuts and desperate loans. No concrete schemes yet, but the clock is ticking.
This budget horror show will unleash “brutal consequences,” the mayor snarled. Every single expense and investment is under the microscope for ruthless scrutiny. Slashing voluntary services is on the table, and that means gutting fun stuff like pools, cultural handouts, or subsidies for clubs. Even pricey building boondoggles, like school upgrades or the long-overdue theater facelift, are hanging by a thread.
On top of that, fees and taxes could skyrocket for residents, like jacking up property taxes on homes. The city council has been wrangling over cuts for months already. With these fresh disasters piling on, the austerity vise is tightening even more viciously. “This is a historically unprecedented nightmare for us in Ingolstadt,” Kern growled.
The financial inferno has been smoldering for ages. While costs for construction fiascos, staff bloat, and social handouts have exploded in recent years, revenues from business taxes have plunged off a cliff. “It’s basically halved compared to the glory days,” Ingolstadt’s mayor spat. This year, the city is pathetically expecting only 55 million euros from business taxes. In peak times, it raked in 200 million.
The root of this evil? The auto industry’s epic meltdown. Audi, with its headquarters in Ingolstadt, is the city’s biggest jobs machine. The factory, employing around 40,000 souls, was the roaring engine of regional growth for decades. But from Audi’s parent overlord Volkswagen, no business tax cash has trickled into Upper Bavaria for a while now. Countless suppliers and service outfits clustered around have been hammered by economic woes. Unemployment is surging. The auto sector’s so-called “transformation” is smashing Ingolstadt “extra brutally,” Mayor Kern thundered.
“Ingolstadt isn’t some freak show outlier,” blasts Achim Sing, mouthpiece for the Bavarian Association of Cities. Almost every Bavarian municipality is choking on cash shortages, “even the ones that were fat and happy before.” Sing rattles off the casualties: Erlangen, Straubing, Regensburg. Even in the state capital Munich, they just announced another gut-wrenching drop in business taxes by 90 million euros a few days ago.
Tons of towns are wrestling to cobble together a balanced budget for next year and are piling on fresh debt like there’s no tomorrow. According to a damning finance report from the Bertelsmann Foundation, Bavaria’s municipalities racked up a record-shattering deficit of 5.3 billion euros in 2024.
Even the once-thriving Ingolstadt is now sucking down loans, but that’s got strict limits too. So, the city bosses led by Michael Kern are begging for a bailout from the state government: “We’re going to drag the Free State of Bavaria into this one-of-a-kind emergency and demand backup.”
