What Role Does the Future Play in Bundestag Speeches?

For the first time, we analyse the role of future topics in Bundestag speeches between 1949 and 2021 using computational linguistic methods. The results show that the discourse on future issues in the Bundestag rose sharply in parallel with the “Wirtschaftswunder” between the 1960s and 1990s. However, since the global financial crisis of 2008, the Bundestag has lost its future focus. An algorithmic content analysis explains this phenomenon: Recent Bundestag speeches deal more with the short-term challenges of multiple crises and less with long-term frameworks.