Lindner stops presenting his budget plans – and now sees his demanding ministerial colleagues on the train. The Greens are confident that an agreement will be reached soon.
The Greens budget expert Sven-Christian Kindler sees new leeway in the dispute in the traffic light coalition about the 2024 budget. “The next tax estimate should give some relaxation,” said the budgetary spokesman for the Greens parliamentary group of the editorial network Germany.
“The development is much better than expected.” He was confident that the traffic light coalition would soon come to an agreement on the controversial basic parameters of the federal budget. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) made it clear that he now sees his fellow ministers on the train.
Postponement of submission of budget plans
It had previously become known that Lindner intends to postpone the submission of its key figures for the 2024 budget. Originally, the budget plans were to be presented to the cabinet next Wednesday. “We will have to talk about financial realities together again in the cabinet,” Lindner told the dpa. He expressly does not name a new point in time. His fellow ministers had announced additional requests of 70 billion euros, for which Lindner, who insists on complying with the debt brake and refraining from tax increases, sees no leeway in the budget.
Now the Finance Minister told the “Welt am Sonntag” that he felt no pressure to reach an agreement: “On the contrary, the colleagues must have an interest in a quick agreement, since their financially effective projects cannot be pushed forward without a budget,” he said. “But I will only go into the cabinet when I have a realistic draft budget.”
The additional demands of the departments did not yet match the possibilities, said Lindner. “But rising interest rates, rising social spending and other costs are forcing us to prioritize.” He will submit proposals to Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on how to proceed. The situation cannot be compared with any budget consultation in the past ten years.
Irritable mood in the coalition
Disputes about the budget are not uncommon in the federal government. But now the ideas of Lindner and several of his cabinet colleagues are so far apart that the finance minister wants to talk again in principle. In extreme cases, this could paralyze the work of the red-green-yellow federal government. Because the dispute over the individual budgets lasts longer and there is no financial basis for legislative projects.
Green budget expert Kindler told the “Rheinische Post”: “It’s not wild that the benchmark decision was postponed, previous finance ministers have already done that. Of course there are different interests, but they can be resolved in the end.” At the same time, Kindler called for the reduction of climate-damaging subsidies. “Especially in times of the climate crisis, the reduction of climate-damaging subsidies would bring a double dividend: for the budget and for our livelihoods,” he told RND and the “Rheinische Post”.
The key points for the 2024 budget were an important reason for the recently irritated mood in the coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP. For example, the new Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) demanded ten billion euros more. Although Lindner has indicated that he supports an increase in the defense budget, he has called for savings elsewhere. There is also a debate about new subsidy programs after the ban on new oil and gas heating systems from 2024 pushed by Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens).
The debt brake in the Basic Law stipulates a strict credit limit for the federal government, which can only be suspended in emergencies – that was the case, for example, during the pandemic.
Source: Stern
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