After 30 hours of negotiations, the coalition committee made up of leaders from the traffic light parties SPD, FDP and Greens has reached an agreement. The resolutions cover 16 pages: it is about climate protection, the expansion of the rail network and the acceleration of planning processes. While the negotiating partners themselves praise the results as forward-looking, criticism comes from associations and the opposition.
left and AfD cannot find anything positive to say about the results of the coalition committee. Left parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch told the news portal t-online: “Increasing the truck toll does not make a total work of art, but is a debacle for the traffic light government and a chancellor with continued weakness in leadership.” At the same time, Bartsch accused the traffic light coalition of “nebulous announcements” and described the result of the consultations as “disgraceful”. Like Bartsch, the parliamentary group leaders of the AfD, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, also criticized the fact that the planned ban on the installation of new oil and gas heating systems is not yet off the table. They called the results of the coalition talks “poor” overall.
The Social association VdK and the Child Protection Association complained about the lack of an agreement on the financing of the planned basic child security.
Representatives of environmental organizations such as Nabu President Jörg-Andreas Krüger criticizes that with the softening of the sector targets, the traffic light government is falling behind the level of the previous government. The Executive Board of Greenpeace, Martin Kaiser, also complained that the Climate Protection Act would be gutted with the abandonment of the obligation to implement each individual sector goal. If 144 additional “climate-damaging highway projects” were to be paved through the country at an accelerated rate, the climate would be further driven into the wall.
Praise, on the other hand, came from Alliance pro rail. Its managing director Dirk Flege welcomed the fact that the railways should receive more money and that funds from the truck toll should also flow for this purpose. “Finally, the compulsion to invest the truck toll revenue in federal trunk roads has been abolished. Now you can invest in environmentally friendly alternatives, that’s a huge step forward,” said Flege. The German Association of Towns and Municipalities welcomed the agreements on the transport sector. He also praised the continued investment in road construction. “Germany will still be dependent on automobility for a very long time. It will take decades to expand the rail network – including the European one – in such a way that the volume of rail transport can increase significantly,” said General Manager Gerd Landsberg Rheinische Post.
Traffic light coalition speaks of groundbreaking results
Leading politicians from the SPD, Greens and FDP, on the other hand, spoke of groundbreaking results. SPD leader Lars Klingbeil spoke in the ZDF “Heute-Journal” of a large modernization package that would change the country over the coming decades. He was also willing to “sit down at a table for two days”. Klingbeil confirmed that the coalition has a common interest in advancing climate protection, expanding infrastructure projects and also drastically reducing planning and approval times. In the ARD “Tagesthemen” the SPD boss said that many of the resolutions would now come to parliament very quickly.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) called the package of measures for the railways and heavy goods traffic “very massive”. Habeck admitted in the ZDF program “Markus Lanz” that the acceleration of planning for motorway projects was not easy for his party, but was part of the compromise process. “That was not a wish of the Greens,” said Habeck. But it is important that problems have been solved. FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr rated the results of the coalition committee as groundbreaking. “Together, the coalition has agreed on a comprehensive modernization and acceleration package that means a true paradigm shift,” Dürr told the German Press Agency. The pace of planning and approval procedures will continue to increase. The climate protection law will be transferred from the “planned economy to the market economy”. The coalition has also committed to openness to technology.
The results of the coalition committee
The coalition committee met with interruptions from Sunday evening to Tuesday evening. The three coalition parties agreed on one Reform of the climate protection law. In addition, in addition to railway lines, certain highway projects, which are intended to eliminate bottlenecks, can be accelerated. We are talking about 144 projects. The train should get more money. For this, in the course of a Reform of the truck toll Additional income will be used predominantly for rail investments. So far, revenue from the truck toll has only been used to build long-distance roads.
In the case of interventions in nature and the landscape, for example through the construction of wind turbines or roads, not only should land be compensated, but money should also be paid as compensation in the future. The annual amounts of CO₂ emitted by sectors such as energy, industry, transport, buildings, agriculture and waste management are to be re-handled. If an area exceeds the agreed annual amount, the ministries must submit so-called emergency programs for more climate protection. The coalition wants to stick to this survey for each sector, but the government should only make adjustments in the future after two consecutive missed targets – for all sectors together.
For the Installation of climate-friendly heating systems there should now be a social balance. However, the coalition wants to stick to the requirement that from January 1, 2024, every newly installed heating system should be operated with 65 percent renewable energy.