A committee of inquiry in the Bavarian state parliament is to clarify how the disaster on the second main line of the Munich S-Bahn could have happened. The Greens, SPD and FDP have agreed on this. The so-called traffic light opposition also wants to pursue the question of why the Free State agreed to exorbitant rent costs at the Nuremberg branch of the Deutsches Museum in another sub-committee; in favor of a private investor. According to the will of the opposition, the immensely expensive second regular route and the expensive museum are to become campaign topics in the coming year. In autumn 2023, the state parliament will be reelected.
Both committees of inquiry had been in talks for some time; now the Greens, SPD and FDP are getting serious. The details are to be presented this Wednesday at a press conference in the state parliament. In both cases, the traffic light opposition is primarily concerned with putting Prime Minister and CSU boss Markus Söder in the spotlight. According to the information available so far, Söder had been warned within the state government since mid-2020 that the construction of the second main route could be delayed by several years.
At the end of 2020, Söder’s government headquarters, the State Chancellery, was also informed by the Bavarian Ministry of Transport about impending cost increases and urgently warned that there was a need for action. However, Söder’s government failed to inform the population in the greater Munich area about the disaster that was becoming increasingly apparent. It was not until mid-2022 that Bavaria’s new Minister of Transport, Christian Bernreiter (CSU), publicly admitted that the completion of the second trunk line, which was last planned for 2028, could be delayed until 2037. And that the construction costs could almost double, to more than seven billion euros.
Deutsche Bahn has now confirmed this. The state government relies on the fact that the railways recently gave exact figures. According to the government, one had waited in vain for years for this and therefore could not publicly state the state of affairs. However, the traffic light opposition does not accept this, pointing to early and very specific estimates in the Ministry of Transport and speaks of a “cover-up”.