Bundesverdienstkreuz

22nd of October, 2026

Who gets the Federal Cross of Merit in Germany? Let’s look at a dataset of 12,865 recipients since 2015.

Background

The Federal Cross of Merit is the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and is awarded by the Federal President. There are several grades, from the Medal of Merit through the Cross of Merit on Ribbon and the Cross of Merit, First Class, to the various forms of the Grand Cross of Merit and the Grand Cross. The details are set out in the so-called statutes of the order. The Medal of Merit and the Cross of Merit on Ribbon make up the overwhelming majority.

What I find interesting about the Federal Cross of Merit is what it tells us about the things and people our political institutions value. I suspect this recognition also shapes what young, ambitious people want to do with their lives.

Data

The Federal President’s website, bundespraesident.de, usually publishes the names four months after the award. The lists give the grade, name and place of residence, but don’t say what each person did to deserve the award. To fill this in, we use the Federal Gazette, WikiProject Federal Cross of Merit, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and reports from the press and public authorities. Some code and some language models later, we have 2,243 people whose age we can determine for at least one award, 1,812 with usable gender data, and 454 with a party affiliation. For 5,415 people, we also know what the award was for. We have a language model sort these by topic and by whether the work was voluntary or professional. Several rounds of checks caught duplicate and mistaken entries, though we still don’t have a reliable estimate of the error rate. If we only know the announcement date, we estimate the award year by subtracting 120 days. The data is current as of 22 October 2026.

Analysis

First, biographical data, starting with age. We can find an age for 2,255 awards in Wikidata, Wikipedia or press reports. This is not necessarily a representative sample, so let’s separate it by source:

Surprisingly, the median age here is 69. In fact, bundespraesident.de says (translated): “Through his awards, the Federal President aims to draw public attention to outstanding achievements that he considers particularly important to our community. In future, women should receive awards even more often, and greater consideration should also be given to young people.”

Which brings us to gender. Here we only use Wikidata and gender-specific occupational titles, with no guessing from first names. In this sample, the share of women rises from 26% in 2015 to 39% in 2025.

Where people live is especially interesting. Here we only use the official lists and their WikiProject transcriptions. We know the German state for 11,488 awards, and the municipality for 11,412 awards. Below are the awards recorded over 2015–2026 per 100,000 inhabitants, with 95% Poisson confidence intervals.

So people in Saarland are about five times as likely to get a Federal Cross of Merit as people in Saxony! Cities with 500,000 inhabitants or more come in slightly below the smaller places.

The most Federal Crosses of Merit go to the independent city of Weimar, the district of Lüchow-Dannenberg and the independent city of Bamberg.

The lists also include 726 recipients living abroad, with 728 awards between them:

The recipients live in 107 different countries. Take Karolin Güler Troubetzkoy, for example, who lives in St. Lucia (which I had forgotten was even a country). She runs a hotel there and is an honorary consul, so a well-deserved Federal Cross of Merit.

It’s hard to tell how educated the recipients are. Titles, at least, are easy to count. Here are the doctors and professors:

I’m mostly surprised by how many professors there are among recipients of the Cross of Merit, First Class, and above.

Now it gets political. Which parties do the recipients belong to? What counts here is membership at the time of the award. For n=455, we can identify a German party.

An overwhelming majority belong to the CDU or SPD. Of course, these parties also have the most members. So let’s look at it per capita, dividing by party membership integrated over the observation period:

Things look more even now. Surprisingly, not a single AfD member has ever been awarded a Federal Cross of Merit while a member of the party. This doesn’t seem to be an artifact of the method either. I tried looking manually and couldn’t find one.

But I find what people got the award for even more interesting than who they are. Here are the categories, sorted by a language model:

Most awards are for social engagement. Business, science and research together account for only 12% of the n=5,023 entries for which a category is available.

Breaking this down by voluntary or professional work gives a similar picture:

It makes sense that we value voluntary work so highly. But I do wonder whether the Federal Cross of Merit gives enough recognition to work that creates economic value. Or perhaps this is just the sample we ended up with: we have data for slightly less than half of the awards.

The code and data for this analysis can be found here.

Here’s to many more Federal Crosses of Merit and citizens deserving thereof!