analysis
Basic child security is coming, but the mood between Family Minister Paus and Finance Minister Lindner remains tense. The current agreement has good sides – but it is not the big hit.
It was no secret that Family Minister Lisa Paus and Finance Minister Christian Lindner were at odds when it came to basic child security. The fact that the mood between the two is still tense at the moment was clearly felt at today’s press conference. Paus spoke of “tough negotiations” – and when Lindner emphasized that he was satisfied with the current solution and the financial structure of 2.4 billion euros, his cabinet colleague interrupted him: “Yes, you can be too.”
When Paus pointed out that the annual sum should grow to six billion euros in the coming years, Lindner dampened these expectations and talked about the fact that in the future there would be fewer children who would be entitled to the payments at all.
Dispute partly held in public
A few months ago, after Paus had made the child protection project a matter close to the heart of the Greens, a partly public dispute developed between the FDP and the Greens.
The numbers alone show who has now prevailed: Green politician Paus started with twelve billion euros, which she demanded. FDP boss Lindner, on the other hand, named a so-called memo item of two billion in the budget. If you have now agreed on 2.4 billion euros, this is clearly not a meeting in the middle.
The spokeswoman for the Green Youth, Sarah-Lee Heinrich, gets to the point and writes on Twitter’s successor X: “No, this basic child security does not get many children out of poverty.”
partisan haggling
Paus, on the other hand, puts on a good face about the partially lost game and emphasizes that payments for families in need should now be “faster, easier and more direct”. Which still has to be proven, because a huge administrative project has to be launched and functioning within 16 months so that the funds can actually be paid out at the beginning of 2025 as planned. The digital bundling of a wide variety of funding opportunities in the so-called child future opportunities portal will only be available in about three years anyway. Paus also admitted that today.
In the end, after months of argument, the chancellor put the two disputants under time pressure so that an agreement could be reached at the closed conference in Meseberg. And for Paus, it was all about keeping the child support project alive at all. Paus had no choice – she had to agree to the mini-compromise.
She had to give up her veto against the Growth Opportunities Act, which she had used to put pressure on the finance minister. That looks more like party-political haggling and not enough like a factual solution.
Not a big hit
The good thing about the current plan is that basic child security, including the individual benefits, should no longer be the responsibility of families in need to become a responsibility of the state. So the state should take care of it so that those who are entitled to the benefits also get them. However, it is unclear how much money this administrative construct will devour – and how much money will actually reach the children. Experts assume that this will not be much.
This means that basic child security will only be a small improvement. She’s not the big hit. But that would have been the political signal that the traffic lights had made a united restart after the summer break.