"Since the start of the pandemic, we have become the pharmacy of the world."
Michael Elbing, the Social Democratic (SPD) mayor of Mainz, is very proud that his city is home to the headquarters of BioNTech, the German pharmaceutical start-up behind the Pfizer vaccine.
And very lucky: the profits generated by the sale of the vaccine "made in Mainz" have turned into fiscal windfall for this town of 220,000 inhabitants.
The capital of Rhineland-Palatinate announced in early November a budget surplus of more than one billion euros for 2021, even though the municipality expected to sink a little further into the red this year.
A "miracle" after more than 30 years of debt
Unheard of for this city, which has had a budget deficit since the end of the 1980s. "We expected, as everywhere else in Germany, to suffer because of the economic cost of the pandemic and we ended up with a a truly exorbitant sum, "admitted Michael Elbing, interviewed by the German daily Die Zeit.
Operating in the shadow of Frankfurt, the prosperous German financial center, Mainz has accumulated more than a billion euros in debt in more than 30 years and is among
the German municipalities most in dire financial straits.
But all that will change thanks
to the "miracle of 2021", as the local councilors call it in lengthy interviews.
The municipality refused to confirm that BioNTech was indeed at the origin of this historic tax surplus, but "several people familiar with the matter have confirmed that it is indeed the start-up which, almost on its own, raised the revenues city tax from 173 million euros in 2020 to 1.09 billion euros in 2021 ", says the Financial Times, in a survey published Sunday, December 26 and devoted to the BioNTech effect for Mainz.
It must be said that the small start-up specializing in messenger RNA treatments generated a net profit of 10 billion euros thanks to the nearly two billion doses of the Pfizer vaccine sold worldwide in 2021. Profits that have benefited him Worth paying more than three billion euros in corporate taxes in all cities where the firm is established in Germany and the United States.
Mainz would therefore have recovered the lion's share of the start-up's tax contributions.
And it's not over.
"The municipality is already counting on a budget surplus of 490 million euros in 2022," says the German press agency DPA.
A promise of a bright fiscal future that has prompted the various local officials to compete in their imagination in their letters to Santa Claus.
"The wish list is growing every day a little more", recognizes Sarah Heil, spokesperson for the town hall of Mainz, questioned on Sunday by the tabloid Bild.
Future German capital of biotech?
"We should multiply the small measures to make the daily life of the inhabitants of Mainz a little more radiant," said Claudius Moseler, local leader of the Green Democratic Party (ÖDP), citing, for example, investments in libraries or the reduction in the tax on dogs. "What if we finally green the facades of public buildings and build more housing for students?", Proposed, for his part, Gerhard Wenderoth, president of the local "Freie Wähler" (Free voters) , a small conservative formation.
The municipality acknowledged that there were needs for infrastructure and investment in municipal services after lean years, notes the British daily The Guardian.
But we will have to wait for the small gifts.
"The inhabitants of Mainz will not immediately feel the effects of this unexpected windfall," warned Michael Elbing, interviewed by SWR, a radio station in southern Germany.
For the local government, "the priority number 1 is the cancellation of the debt", assured Günter Beck, first deputy mayor and local head of the Greens, questioned by the Financial Times.
A goal that the city hopes to achieve by the end of 2022, provided that BioNTech continues to play its role of the golden egg lab.
And that's the whole problem for Mainz: its good tax fortune is based on a single start-up whose profits depend essentially on the world's needs for a vaccine against Covid-19.
Hence the great plan to transform Mainz into the German capital of biotechnologies.
The town hall has already set its sights on 30 hectares of land around the headquarters of BioNTech which should be used to build the future technoscientific center from 2024 and create more than 5,000 jobs over ten years, according to the ambitious plans of the municipality. .
It is still necessary that the start-ups opt for Mainz rather than for other German magnets with young shoots like Berlin or Munich.
"We are now known as far away as Singapore!" Says Günter Jertz, director of the regional chamber of commerce.
For him, the BioNTech effect will inevitably attract other entrepreneurs.
Risky political choice
For the municipality, nothing beats an additional tax incentive to finally convince companies to come and set up in its territory.
At the beginning of December, a reduction in local corporate taxes was voted, making Mainz the most attractive municipality in the whole region from a fiscal point of view, notes Die Zeit.
Local authorities hope that the city will no longer depend so heavily on the good health of its global vaccine star.
A reduction in taxes which made the teeth cringe in Wiesbaden, a city bordering Mainz. "It is a gesture which denotes a total lack of solidarity at the local level. We absolutely cannot compete with Mainz with such a reduction in taxes", regretted Christian Diers, head of the FDP group in the city council Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) in Wiesbaden. The city is afraid of becoming the poor relation of "Mainz the triumphant".
The tax cut is also a risky political choice.
In Marburg, a city in the Land of Hesse located north of Frankfurt, the fiscal windfall of BioNTech - which has a research center there - has created rififi within the ruling coalition.
The SPD and the Greens have decided, as in Mainz, to lower local corporate taxes in order to attract other start-ups.
Much to the chagrin of Die Linke, the radical left party, which would have preferred that the tax surplus be used to help the poorest.
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