Budget crisis: The Chancellor’s embarrassing anniversary

Opinion

Now it is clear: When the new year begins, Germany will be left without a budget. Olaf Scholz, Christian Lindner and Robert Habeck failed to plug the billion-dollar hole that the Constitutional Court tore into their state coffers in time. The Chancellor from the SPD met his party committees and the Bundestag parliamentary group on Thursday . At least here the Chancellor is leading from the front. The only question is: where to?

A budget is the basis of every policy. A government that can no longer agree on a common budget is politically incapable of acting. Even if this only applies to the first few weeks of the new year: a coalition cannot sink any lower. A budget is not everything in politics. But without a household everything is nothing.

To the party conference with empty hands and lousy values

Olaf Scholz, who privately celebrated his silver wedding anniversary on Thursday evening, is politically embarrassing anniversary before: When the Chancellor joins his comrades at the SPD party conference on Friday – exactly two years to the day after his election in the Bundestag – he will come empty-handed in many respects. His government has no budget for 2024. His coalition has lost massive support in the polls, and that too .

The certainly presentable crisis management from the first year of government has long since been overshadowed by a second year that can be summarized in three words: heating law, Budget crisis, helplessness. A government that wanted to show its citizens prospects for the future is gradually governing itself towards hopelessness. In moments like this, you like to console yourself with the sentence: Things can only get better. But in this case that’s not true.

“The traffic light’s biggest domestic political crisis”

The three most important politicians in the coalition have it in the “biggest domestic political crisis“(SPD leader Lars Klingbeil) did not manage to jump over their shadows to repair the serious damage that they caused at the beginning of their government with a risky financial trick. That is embarrassing enough.

In addition, however, no political agreement on the future budget is conceivable that could really increase the standing of this coalition. Because in reality it’s all about the question of who has to pay for the damage that the traffic lights have caused the country. Tax increases, subsidy reductions, savings, no matter where the government plans to raise the at least 17 billion euros missing, it’s as if a driver gets the money from the next uninvolved pedestrian because of a parking ticket.

Seized for money that wasn’t hers

But if the Chancellor and his colleagues find completely new ways to raise the money, if they design another pseudo-ingenious new creative accounting system, or if they even celebrate themselves in the end for using the crisis as an opportunity for something, then people will ask questions why, in times of need, it is suddenly possible to do what was foregone at the beginning of the coalition.

Because the fact remains: This coalition only exists because in the beginning it used money that it didn’t have to overcome differences. Because she paid the bill of power with loans that were not hers. Because they sat on itto somehow muddle through. This is a mistake that can no longer be cured. And that the traffic light now wants to make you forget by continuing to muddle through. Who else is that supposed to convince?