The Committee on Budgets is a powerful body. Ministers who do not show the committee the respect they want have to wait longer before they are admitted. And in the clean-up meetings, MPs can become heroes of their constituency, if there is still money for a heart project in their home country. At the moment, however, this committee is primarily the place where the mechanisms of politics can be viewed in the most beautiful way.
This Monday, experts will give their assessment of whether the traffic light with its 60 billion supplementary budget is proceeding very cleverly or very unconstitutionally. Half will see it this way, the other half will see it differently. But what is more interesting is how the political actors see it. Namely, completely different than before, in other words: before the election.
The antagonists are Christian Lindner, FDP boss and finance minister, and Helge Braun, ex-minister of the chancellery and now chairman of the budget committee. Together they are the protagonists of the play: “What do I care about my chatter from yesterday?” Because when the FDP was still in opposition, Lindner and his family found it difficult to unconstitutional when the grand coalition shifted a good 26 billion euros to the energy and climate fund in 2020 as a supplementary budget.
Now Lindner is doing the same with 60 billion euros and calls it “a powerful signal of ability to act”. Braun, in turn, suggested a year ago that the debt brake should be completely suspended for the time being. But now he calls Lindner’s household trick dubious.
So the man who wanted to suspend the debt brake suddenly worries about her. And the man who cared very much for her smuggled billions past her. One can take that to be pragmatic. Or for a bad posture.