comment
The weeks of wrangling over the budget show that the federal government has apparently lost all will to cooperate. This coalition will no longer achieve anything.
Will the traffic light coalition manage to produce a draft budget for the coming year in time? Hardly any other question has moved Berlin’s political scene in recent weeks as much as this one. For the vast majority of citizens, it is quite unimportant whether there would have been a valid budget law on January 1 next year – or only a few weeks later.
This year, 2024, also began without a valid federal budget after the Federal Constitutional Court declared the traffic light coalition’s multi-billion dollar climate and transformation fund inadmissible. Does anyone remember that?
Traffic light has gambled away last credit
Trust is much more important for the support of a government among the population. Will the Chancellor and his cabinet be able to provide answers to the most pressing questions of the day? And the traffic light coalition has gambled away its last credit with its weeks-long and ultimately increasingly undignified budget wrangling.
To make it clear again: it was only about five billion euros, or one percent of the total budget. But the inability to present a coherent financial concept for the urgently needed renovation of the rail network and motorways speaks volumes.
This traffic light coalition has not only run out of political common ground, but also apparently any will to work together. The self-proclaimed progressive coalition has become a coalition of stagnation, and people feel it.
Coalition started strong
Where is the radical revival of the German economy? What is the traffic light coalition’s common stance on migration? How can the welfare state remain reliable and affordable for an ageing society?
While these and other crises demand answers, the FDP, for example, is enjoying openly provoking its coalition partners by wanting to dismantle the SPD-led Ministry for Development Aid and, with a nod to the Greens, allowing more cars into city centers again.
This coalition started off strong – it managed Corona well on the whole, it maintained a consistent position in the Ukraine war, it prevented cold winters after Russia stopped supplying gas.
This traffic light will no longer shape anything
In the meantime, however, the three-party alliance is caught between the market-liberal dreams of the FDP, the Greens’ tendentially dirigistic climate protection policy – and an SPD in which there are social policy and security policy positions that border on denial of reality.
Not even the man at the top, Olaf Scholz, can convince a majority of Germans of himself and his government with his formulaic assurances that everything is on the right track.
So now there is a draft budget, and the coalition may continue to govern until next autumn. But this traffic light coalition will not achieve anything. The alliance of the SPD, Greens and FDP started with a selfie. But the battery is now empty.
