analysis
The summer break is barely over – and the traffic light is already arguing again. A draft law by Finance Minister Lindner was removed from the cabinet’s agenda at short notice. What’s behind it?
While half the country is still on school vacation, the first cabinet meeting after the summer break shattered the dream of restarting the traffic light coalition. In one of ten laws that were supposed to pass through the Scholz cabinet, the porcelain of the traffic light family was smashed again: Neither late-evening talks nor a top-level discussion with the chancellor, the finance minister and the family minister could help with the “growth opportunities law” coming from the finance ministry .
At noon it was clear: Family Minister Lisa Paus will veto Lindner’s law, supported by Green Environment Minister Steffi Lemke.
It smells like revenge
The precarious thing about it is that the veto was carried out by female Green Ministers, while Robert Habeck, who is also Green Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, had already negotiated the draft law with Lindner and the Chancellery by mutual agreement. So it smells like a classic revenge: If you don’t reliably put the money for basic child security aside for me as Minister, then I won’t release the billions for the economy either.
It is questionable whether the Greens are doing themselves a favor. It is clear here that there is no consensus within the Green leadership on the strategy of how to negotiate with the FDP, which sometimes ticks very differently, especially on financial issues. In doing so, they create an image of the bazaar’s politics on the one hand, and the internal disunity on the other.
The restart seemed conceivable
The anger from the weeks-long FDP blockade of Habeck’s building energy law runs deep with the Greens. But there the FDP argued in terms of content and was not satisfied with the law, which they expressed in turn not by veto, but by a memorandum – in order to then massively delay the start of parliamentary law negotiations. But before the summer break, everyone involved was optimistic that they would be able to amicably say goodbye at the beginning of September.
A restart of the traffic light seemed conceivable, especially since many summer interviews were happy to state that communication had to be improved and conflicts about laws were more likely to be settled in the anteroom of politics. Even Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier held talks with the traffic light leaders in July and called for better communication. When everyone has a holiday after a year and a half of crisis politics, it will be better, so the hope. And then this.
One can assume that Paus is really concerned about her cause – and the concern that the basic child security planned by the coalition will not become an effective instrument against child poverty due to the lack of financial volume in the federal budget. But the question arises as to whether her tactical actions, with which she suddenly brought political Berlin out of its summer lull, really served the cause. Will she get the Minister of Finance more in a spending mood?
fatal signal
The antipodes in this matter, Lindner and Paus, are continuing an existing difference of opinion that was settled by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz at short notice during the budget deliberations for 2024 in July: he reached an agreement between the two for the 2024 budget year, for the medium-term financial planning from 2025 only a placeholder number was inserted. Paus was given homework by Scholz to develop a concept by the end of August on how basic child security should be calculated. That depends heavily on the still open question of how high the minimum subsistence level is defined for the individual child.
From Paus’ point of view, the veto for Lindner’s business development program should be a warning shot in the direction of Lindner. The Ministry of Finance, in turn, speaks of “blackmail”. For the traffic light coalition as a whole, it is fatal in several respects: On the one hand, the comment columns will be full of the traffic light coalition’s renewed dispute – or even the increasing inability to reach an agreement through an orderly political process. The fact that important legislative projects such as solar subsidies (from Habeck), the future financing law (from Lindner) or even a practicable template for municipal heating planning went through the cabinet together and noiselessly on the same day is certainly less noticed in the slipstream of the new old dispute .
This is also fatal, because the image of the coalition and the chancellor is – according to surveys – already battered. And who can trust a government in which the ministries accuse each other of blackmail? Even more fatal, however, is the resulting public impression that the self-proclaimed “progress coalition” is playing off economic opportunities and support against children’s opportunities and support. That shouldn’t happen to a government led by a Social Democrat – and contradicts pretty much everything that Scholz came up with as a candidate for chancellor.
Will there be an agreement in Meseberg?
Maybe we have to say what no one says in the traffic light coalition in Berlin: This constellation of three, a novelty in the history of the Federal Republic, is simply overwhelmed by the situation – possibly due to their very different basic attitudes, especially in financial policy. In better times, without the financial consequences of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, the alliance could certainly have functioned more easily. Negotiating and struggling for political answers to the climate crisis would have been difficult enough.
In two weeks there is a cabinet meeting in Meseberg. Until then, the “Growth Opportunities Act” has also been postponed – with the prospect of agreement, according to government circles. But in Meseberg it should also be about more fundamental things in terms of cooperation within the government. The coalition can no longer afford such a false start.