In the face of new record payments, Bavaria will sue against the state financial equalization. The cabinet decided on the step that had already been announced three months before the state elections on Tuesday in Munich, as Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) announced at noon.
“It needs more money at home,” he said. Bavarian money is better off in Bavaria than in Bremen or Berlin. He feels the system is deeply unfair, said Söder. “We have now paid 100 billion and received three billion.” From the high contribution that Bavaria pays, other federal states afforded “things that we can’t afford”.
Bavaria bears 53 percent of the total burden of fiscal equalization, said Söder. The scissors have widened massively, fewer and fewer countries are paying more and more money to most of the federal states. Bavaria demands upper limits for recipients and a change in the city-state regulation. Because in this way citizens in Berlin or Bremen are better off than people in Munich or Augsburg.
“We are and will remain in solidarity, but not naive,” repeated Söder. He had said the sentence several times in connection with the state financial equalization.
“The injustices in the current equal rights system are literally striking,” added Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU). Bavaria would have liked to negotiate further, he said, but the result was to be expected if few countries financed many countries. It is now time to have the structures checked.
Söder and the state government had long announced the constitutional complaint against the equalization system, which is now officially called the financial power equalization of the states. The opposition accuses the CSU and the Free Voters of pure “campaign noise”. “We want to reform the state financial equalization and relieve the Bavarian taxpayers,” Söder wrote on Twitter in the morning. Bavaria now pays almost ten billion euros to other federal states every year. “The Free State will no longer accept these dimensions, which is why we are suing – it can’t go on like this!”
As part of the financial equalization between the 16 federal states, around 18.5 billion euros were redistributed last year. With payments of almost 9.9 billion euros, Bavaria again bore by far the largest burden – the Free State alone accounted for more than half of the redistributed money. According to the statement by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Baden-Württemberg paid almost 4.5 billion euros, and Hesse paid 3.25 billion euros. Hamburg contributed around 814 million euros and Rhineland-Palatinate around 107 million euros. Eleven countries, on the other hand, benefited from compensation payments. Berlin was the largest recipient with around 3.6 billion euros.
In 2013, Bavaria – together with Hesse – had already filed a lawsuit against the state financial equalization system at the time. At that time, too, the lawsuit was decided within sight of the Bavarian election. The two states then withdrew their lawsuit in 2017 after the financial relations between the federal and state governments had been reorganized. The system is now called financial power equalization. It serves the goal enshrined in the Basic Law of creating equal living conditions in Germany. Unlike back then, Bavaria is alone with its lawsuit this time – although Söder’s counterparts from Baden-Württemberg and Hesse also consider the current equalization system to be in urgent need of reform. The Bavarian Greens also recently acknowledged the need for reform – but see the lawsuit as a “signal of lack of ideas” and “campaign roar”.