Marcel Fratzscher

Marcel Fratzscher is President of DIW Berlin (Deutsches Institut fuer Wirtschaftsforschung, or German Institute for Economic Research), Germany's largest and most influential independent economic research institute. In April 2026, Fratzscher emerged as a prominent public critic of the German federal government's EUR 1.6 billion fuel relief package announced amid the energy supply crisis, arguing that the measure provides poorly targeted consumer subsidies rather than addressing the structural inadequacy of Germany's storage refill economics.

Fratzscher holds a professorship at the Humboldt University of Berlin and was previously a senior economist at the European Central Bank (ECB). He is a frequent commentator in German public media and a regular contributor to policy debates on European monetary policy, fiscal rules, and energy transition economics. DIW Berlin publishes the DIW Weekly Report and the DIW Economic Bulletin and provides economic analysis to the German Bundestag, European institutions, and international bodies. The institute is structurally independent of federal funding capture and takes positions that frequently challenge official government economic policy.

His criticism of the fuel relief package feeds into the broader debate about Germany's approach to the 2026 supply crisis: whether emergency spending should be directed at consumer protection or at structural incentives for storage refill. VNG AG's simultaneous lobbying for government intervention in injection economics reflects the same underlying tension. Fratzscher's public stance gives the opposition to consumer subsidies an authoritative institutional voice, increasing pressure on the CDU/CSU-SPD Coalition to justify its choice of instrument.