Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has offered the federal states, the municipalities and the democratic opposition to work closely together in order to advance urgently needed reforms and modernize the country. “We need a national effort,” he said in the Bundestag on Wednesday morning, “so let’s join forces.” Scholz called for “speed instead of standstill, action instead of sitting out, cooperation instead of quarreling”.
Specifically, the Chancellor has a “Germany Pact” in mind, which should cover four topics: accelerated planning and approval procedures and faster implementation of important infrastructure projects, strengthening competitiveness and growth, modernizing and digitizing the administration and recruiting more specialists while limiting illegal migration. The reason for Scholz’s speech was the budget week in the Bundestag, in which the individual budgets of the ministries are discussed until Friday. Traditionally, the Chancellor’s budget is on the agenda on Wednesday, which is always associated with a general debate and an exchange of blows between the opposition and the government.
The leader of the largest opposition faction always makes the start. Friedrich Merz (CDU) used his appearance on Wednesday to harshly criticize the chancellor and the traffic light coalition. With regard to the “turning point” proclaimed by Scholz after Russia’s attack on Ukraine last year, Merz criticized the government for achieving the NATO target of two percent of economic output for defense spending only thanks to the Bundeswehr’s special fund. For the time after that, there is a risk of structural underfunding of the Bundeswehr; At least 30 billion euros would be missing from the defense budget by 2027 at the latest. For the SPD and the Greens in particular, the Bundeswehr remains “an unloved child,” said Merz.
Chancellor and opposition leaders rarely agree. But in one point
Basically, Merz accused the government of working on an increasingly paternalistic state. The focus of his criticism was the upcoming increase in citizen income and the planned basic child security. Work must be worth more than receiving transfer payments, Merz demanded. But people “didn’t go back to work because they can calculate that they’ll get more out of state transfer payments at the end of the year”. Speaking to the government, he added: “People can do math, unlike some of you.” Merz also denounced the “insane amount of bureaucracy” in the country and cited the example of the heating law, which is to be passed this Friday.
When it came to bureaucracy, however, Merz and Scholz even agreed on Wednesday. The chancellor, too, prefaced his invitation to joint modernization efforts with an astonishingly relentless diagnosis of the current situation. The infrastructure was worn out, there was a shortage of workers, and a “mildew” of bureaucracy, risk aversion and despondency had settled over the country. “We have to clear the bureaucracy,” said Scholz. “The citizens are tired of this standstill. And so am I.”
Scholz made it particularly important for the federal states to change the status quo – also because, in his opinion, they share responsibility for the misery. With regard to the Skilled Immigration Act, for example, he called for modern, networked immigration authorities. He also criticized the fact that network expansion procedures were being completed too slowly. The expansion of wind power can only be done in cooperation with the federal states, said Scholz and praised Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony “and also North Rhine-Westphalia”, which had significantly increased their permits. The Chancellor also emphasized that the federal government had already digitized 85 percent of its administrative services, while the federal states and local authorities had only made a quarter of the promised services accessible online.
With a view to the weak economic growth, Scholz said that the best growth program would be if a company only had to wait three months for the building permit or operating permit instead of three years. Faster means digitizing all planning processes and simply doing without some approval requirements. This is cheaper and more sustainable than permanent subsidies. On the other hand, he doesn’t think much of a “debt-financed flash in the pan called an economic stimulus package.”
The countries invited by Scholz to participate showed little enthusiasm for Scholz’s “Germany Pact” on Wednesday. North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) spoke of a “PR gag” and said Rheinische Post: “I feel frankly kidnapped.” After all, it’s about “projects that are already in the pipeline and that we as countries have been demanding for a long time”.