According to an expert opinion, the draft budget is once again in jeopardy. Finance Minister Lindner speaks of a shortfall of 5 billion euros.
BERLIN taz | After a laborious agreement, difficult renegotiations could be on the horizon: According to a report from his office, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) sees a gap of around 5 billion euros in the draft budget for the coming year and has called for new talks within the government. Lindner’s move caused irritation and criticism among his coalition partners. The Greens said on Monday that there was no reason for new negotiations. There would not be much time to scrape together the billions: The Finance Ministry plans to submit the draft budget to the Bundestag in around two weeks.
On Monday, the German government issued calming words in response to the renewed dispute. Deputy government spokesman Wolfgang Büchner said that everyone was “well-intentioned and optimistic that everything can be resolved in the end.” SPD leader Saskia Esken, on the other hand, was not at all happy with the FDP chairman and finance minister, who had inflamed the new debate with statements on Sunday in an interview on ZDFLindner is once again damaging the government, said Esken. “He talks about transparency, but he has not created transparency within the government, but with the public. That is indecent, and it serves to promote one’s own profile.”
The Greens’ deputy parliamentary group leader Andreas Audretsch spoke out against renegotiations. “There are sufficient legal and financial policy options for a good solution,” he explained. It is the job of the finance minister to propose a “solution that is acceptable to everyone.”
The background to the dispute is a report by the Finance Ministry’s Scientific Advisory Board, which had expressed concerns about the repurposing of loans. The report examined whether emergency loans parked at the state development bank KfW, which were actually intended for the gas price cap, could be used to finance other expenditure in the budget. The advisory board had already expressed “significant doubts” about this idea on Thursday.
Union faction doubts the timetable
When it reached a budget agreement in mid-July, the federal government agreed to examine several instruments to close a hole of around 17 billion euros in the budget. In addition to the above-mentioned idea of using KfW loans differently, officials in the Chancellery and the Finance Ministry also examined two other possible sources of money: Deutsche Bahn and the Autobahn company would be cut from subsidies and instead granted loans. In accounting terms, this would ensure that the debt brake, which the Finance Minister is pushing for, is maintained.
According to reports from the Handelsblatt the Scientific Advisory Board The Finance Ministry has raised several criticisms of the federal government’s ideas. For example, the conversion of subsidies to the motorway company is questionable, as the company does not have any independent income.
Despite these assessments, the federal government was confident. Deputy government spokesman Büchner said that both Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and, “as far as I can see,” Finance Minister Lindner agreed that two of the three options were legally possible, while a third was constitutionally unfeasible. We now need to see how to deal with the results of the reports.
The federal government wants to send its draft budget to the Bundestag in mid-August so that the budget plan can be turned into law. On Monday, the opposition voiced clear criticism of the traffic light parties’ approach. “In July, the cabinet approved an unconstitutional draft budget, which the traffic light coalition must now correct at breakneck speed by August 16, 2024,” explained Christian Haase, budget policy spokesman for the Union parliamentary group. If this does not succeed, the parliamentary budget discussions will have to be postponed, said the CDU politician.
