While Berlin is still puzzling over when and how the government will solve its budget problem for the coming year, the Bundestag’s budget managers are trying to at least make progress with the repair work for this year. More precisely: with the supplementary budget for 2023, through which Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) wants to cure the unconstitutionality of his previous figures. On Tuesday, the Bundestag’s Budget Committee held an expert hearing on the matter. In summary, the majority of the experts judged: The supplementary budget will not win any beauty prizes, but it is just about okay.
Alexander Thiele, for example, a law professor at the Business & Law School Berlin, believes it is permissible for an emergency to be declared retroactively for 2023. This step became necessary because, after the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling, loans suddenly count towards the debt brake, which the federal government actually wanted to bypass. The funds that the federal government wanted to use to combat the crisis – such as the Doppelwumms Fund WSF – were “retroactively no longer applicable,” said Thiele. Therefore, it is “exceptionally” permissible to declare the emergency retroactively.
The Federal Audit Office is more critical
The constitutional lawyer Hanno Kube, who represented the Union faction in its lawsuit in Karlsruhe, sees a remaining constitutional risk with regard to the retroactive granting of new loan authorizations for the WSF and the reconstruction aid fund for the Ahr Valley disaster. As a result, it was “justifiably demonstrated” that an emergency situation existed.
The Federal Audit Office was more critical. Its expert Jan Keller also considers the supplementary budget for 2023 to be unconstitutional – because of the emergency declared retroactively and because, in his opinion, the government is still cheating on net borrowing. Unlike the government, the Court of Auditors believes that all federal special funds are affected by the ruling – not just those that were financed through emergency loans. Then the government would have continued to underestimate the new borrowing in the supplementary budget. The economist Thiess Büttner from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg sees this point similarly.
The constitutional lawyer Joachim Wieland from the Speyer University of Administrative Sciences contradicted this. “The ruling only applies to special funds that make use of emergency loans,” he said. The Constitutional Court did not have to decide anything else. His colleague Thiele even warned that one should “not overuse” the verdict; The court dealt with emergency loans, and the strict annuality only applies to this.
The still vague 2024 budget repeatedly cast its shadow in the hearing. The SPD housekeeper Bettina Hagedorn, for example, asked whether it wouldn’t be almost the “logical consequence of the judgment” to now also declare an emergency for the coming year. The legal scholar Armin Steinbach replied that the situation on the energy markets was probably not sufficient for a repeat of the emergency. On the other hand, it would be easier to justify a “more restrictive emergency situation” with regard to the war in Ukraine.
For the SPD it is clear: “We will not abandon the welfare state.”
The expert Kube commissioned by the Union, on the other hand, warned with a view to 2024 that the financing of an original emergency would at some point become a regular state task. The SPD expert Thiele also said that emergencies diffuse into normal economic development at some point. This “intermediate state” cannot be resolved without changing the debt brake.
For such a reform, however, the traffic light would need the Union faction – and at the moment it already has enough to do with itself. There is concern in the SPD, for example, that without a fundamental agreement on a renewed suspension of the debt brake, its own federal party conference this weekend could be difficult for Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In any case, the corridor for compromise remains narrow. On Tuesday, SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert once again categorically ruled out cuts in the social sector that were demanded by parts of the FDP. “We will not abandon the welfare state.”
Pressure also comes from SPD-led federal states. “We now expect quick financing commitments from the federal government, especially with regard to the hydrogen projects,” said Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD). South German newspaper. “The affected companies urgently need clarity for their further planning.”