But when Mrs. Merkel offered the F.D.P. the development ministry, the party accepted; it meant more seats in the cabinet. Not only does the ministry still exist, but the staff has increased, even while the government has set up a special commission to cut bureaucracy.

This runs counter to what Mrs. Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister, have called for during the euro crisis. Both have insisted that in return for German loan guarantees to euro-indebted countries, those governments must introduce radical savings programs. These entail cutting the public sector and social welfare benefits.

Mrs. Merkel has repeatedly said that Germany has already undergone such pain. But it was not her center-right government that introduced longer working hours or overhauled the welfare system. It was her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat. He pushed through such measures in a coalition with the Greens, not the Free Democrats.

In fact, under Mrs. Merkel, the state has thrived, not retreated.

Last September, Ehrhardt Bödecker, a historian and retired banker, paid for a full-page open letter to Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Schäuble in the conservative national daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Since 2008, a year before Mrs. Merkel was re-elected for a second term, the number of civil servants had risen to 4,562,000 in 2010 from 4,505,000, Mr. Bödecker charged. In statistics confirmed by various ministries, he also said that over this period, state expenditures had increased to €1.164 trillion, or $1.5 trillion, from €1.086 trillion.

In 1912, when Germany, then Prussia, was far bigger, stretching into Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, the education authorities had one minister and 64 civil servants. “Today, for a poor education system, we need 16 state ministers, 34 state secretaries and 130,000 civil servants,” Mr. Bödecker wrote. “All of this is an unbearable waste of money, the costs of which will have to be borne by the next generation.”

Critics scorn the Free Democrats, the party of less bureaucracy, less regulation and a smaller state, for going along with this trend. But Alexander Lambsdorff, a Free Democrat and a member of the European Parliament, disagrees that the party has turned away from its libertarian principles.