It doesn't mean that these politicians are untouchable.

If a politician is being caught stealing (e.g. embezzlement), criminal charges W I L L be put forward and immunity will be stripped from them.

The problem here is that unethical behaviour and gross incompetence simply aren't criminal offences.

Are they to be tolerated? No! But that's a question of changing laws and legislation accordingly, not one of being "untouchable" - because even politicians aren't and that's the point.

There's a difference between conflict of interests/unethical behaviour/incompetence and criminal actions.

The consequence of scandals like this should be a call for tighter laws, increased responsibility of all involved parties and better financial supervision in both politics and private enterprise.

Simply getting out the pitchforks, shouting that all politicians are corrupt criminals and demanding heads to roll doesn't change anything and isn't constructive.

Corruption is different from gross incompetence and unethical behavior.

You're still missing the point completely - corruption is a crime. The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place.

This is why legislation and regulations need to change, because that's way easier than trying to change people.

If you don't like the rules of the game, demand to change the rules instead of shouting "You're all cheaters!" and stop there. That's just cheap and not helpful at all.

I generally agree with your point, but I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem. Once you reach high level politics, the fact is that anything but utterly blatant criminal behavior will be a political issue.

The solution is that politicians need to be held to a much higher standard than the letter of the law, by their voters. It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

> I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem

Feel free to disagree with that. I stand by my point on account of the lack of transparency (e.g. no obligation to make ancillary income public) and the legality of the "Revolving Door"-effect.

Government officials in Germany are free to leave office for private enterprise with no restrictions. Public officers have to report lobbying jobs to their former office for 5 years, but the worst that can happen if they don't is loosing their pension.

The latter is not much of a problem, though, if the new employer just pays well enough...

This leads to CFOs of DAX companies becoming government officials in the ministry of finance; public officers serving in the ministry for radiation protection who dealt with interim storage facilities to leave office for (nuclear-) energy companies, and so on.

Holding politicians to higher standards than the law is delusional. Politicians are humans, too. None of them are Jesus Christ incarnate and none of them should be either, because in a democracy they should represent The People, not some Utopian ideal.

> It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

That's because in Germany, nobody knows that there even is a conflict of interests, because politicians aren't obligated to make additional income public.

A reasonable first step would be to make that mandatory (you don't even have to disclose exact sums of money, but it helps knowing that your representative has a paid seat in some board of directors on the side).

You just need to be slightly less corrupted than other politicians

> The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place.

That is an assumption on your part. In the absence of thorough investigations that would condemn or exonerate them, it is difficult to say. Of course, it would be very twisted to say that the lack of investigations is proof of real corruption. Still, it should also not be taken as prrof of no corruption.