Although the state government has missed the goal it set itself in 2013 of making Bavaria completely barrier-free within ten years, Social Affairs Minister Ulrike Scharf (CSU) sees the state as going in the right direction. “Yes, it’s true, 2023 was an ambitious, ambitious goal,” she said on Friday at a major political event of the social association VdK in Nuremberg. But it is “not that we haven’t achieved anything” – 68 percent of all public buildings are easily accessible, and around 50 percent of the almost 1,100 train stations and stops are barrier-free. Here you get involved, although it is a task of Deutsche Bahn. In the past eight years, Bavaria has spent 935 million euros on accessibility, and 140 million euros are planned for the 2023 budget. Scharf promised a “great effort”, it was a “permanent task”. The missed target – announced ten years ago by the then Prime Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) – does not seem to be a defeat. Rather, this “triggered a very specific awareness-raising”.
The VdK has invited the top candidates of the state parliament parties, with the exception of the AfD, to the Nuremberg Meistersingerhalle for a debate – in front of more than 2000 members. The minister came in for the CSU top candidate Markus Söder. That’s a shame, said VDK President and Country Manager Verena Bentele, especially since the event is taking place in Söder’s constituency. The prime minister “would have had the chance to show the socio-political profile of the CSU as a top priority.”
With regard to accessibility, Bentele said that it was by no means just about train stations, but also about public buildings. “Who would question fire safety? Nobody. Who questions accessibility? Fiscal politicians, for example.” She finds that “unbearable” and that it is an investment in the future. Söder is following the “Bavaria one” space project, she would like “Accessibility one” better. Support came from Green Party leader Katharina Schulze. She called for an accessibility law with specific goals and measures, “not always just could have been nice”. This included a tightening of the Bavarian building regulations and significantly more investments.
Hubert Aiwanger (FW) reinforced his recent idea of only starting income tax at 2000 euros on the podium on many socio-political topics in order to relieve low earners and to lure pensioners and recipients of basic income into the labor market. “Good social policy is good economic policy,” he said. Florian von Brunn (SPD) attested to Aiwanger’s “political grandchild trick to pick up voters’ votes at the front door” – the project could not be financed. Martin Hagen (FDP) announced, among other things, that the recently debated abolition of spouse splitting “cannot be done with the FDP”.
With around 790,000 members, the VdK is the largest socio-political interest group in Bavaria. In the first half of 2023 alone, almost 185,000 consultations on social law took place in the VdK offices. Pension, severe disability and increasing care are priorities, it said, as well as “an obvious revision of the social authorities”. The VdK had already presented its demands for the state elections on Thursday and lamented a “social downturn” in Bavaria. As examples, Bentele named increasing poverty and a critical situation in caring for relatives, as he did on Friday in Nuremberg. “In view of the great poverty in old age and children in Bavaria, there can be no talk of a white-blue idyll.”