Coalition negotiations
Habeck or Lindner? Item dispute over future finance minister is on the horizon
Robert Habeck (left) or Christian Lindner? The first conflict between the traffic light parties threatens to fill the post of finance minister.
© John MacDougall / AFP
The coalition negotiations are to begin in the new week. So far, the conversations between the traffic light parties have been astonishingly harmonious. A first conflict is now becoming apparent. It’s about the post of finance minister.
The SPD and the Greens have already agreed. the FDP is expected to follow this Monday. This week, the traffic light parties could start the specific coalition negotiations announced at the end of last week. For the first time on Sunday, the previously extraordinarily harmonious discussions between the three parties threatened to be overshadowed. It is about a personnel issue that has been simmering for a long time: Who should become finance minister in the coming government? FDP leader Christian Lindner or Green chairman Robert Habeck? Representatives of both parties tried to recapture the debate on Sunday.
The General Secretary of the FDP, Volker Wissing, rejected a debate on the future finance minister on Sunday. “At the moment there are no departmental questions at all for us,” he told the editorial network in Germany in a preliminary report. “We’ll sort things out at the end of successful coalition negotiations.” At the moment, only content-related questions are relevant.
Kubicki and Buschmann for Christian Lindner
Before that, however, some of Wissing’s party friends had been more offensive. Both the FDP vice-president Wolfgang Kubicki and the parliamentary manager of the FDP parliamentary group, Marco Buschmann, had rushed ahead. Unsurprisingly, they declared that they consider their own party leader, Lindner, to be the best candidate for the office of Federal Minister of Finance.
The Green finance expert and MEP Sven Giegold criticized these remarks to the RND: “What is that supposed to mean? We have negotiated with each other in good style. That could be continued until the end.” Positions would be awarded according to democratic majorities and negotiations and not after interviews. His party colleague, Baden-Württemberg’s finance minister Danyal Bayaz, has already campaigned for the Green party leader Robert Habeck as federal finance minister. Bayaz wrote on Twitter on Saturday that he could not imagine anyone better in this position.
Robert Habeck: Debate “not helpful”
However, Bayaz generated little enthusiasm among his party leader. Robert Habeck criticized the debate started by FDP politicians as “not helpful”. “It is part of fairness, good manners and political wisdom not to do that now. In case of doubt, you only increase your own height,” said Habeck on Sunday evening in the ARD program “Report from Berlin”.
The Greens co-boss said that Lindner had never made a secret of the fact that he wanted to become finance minister, and that he made this more than clear in the election campaign. But it is not helpful to start speculating on personnel now – even before the coalition negotiations begin.
“The competition is there, no question about it”
“We have very different ideas about financial policy. The competition is there, no question about it. The confidence that this will then happen as agreed has yet to be proven, also in the coalition talks,” emphasized Habeck. He himself always put “all personal ambitions of people including myself” on the back burner. “I pat on the fingers of everyone who twitches. That’s why I can say for my shop that we won’t do that.”