At the weekend, Lisa Paus, the family minister from the Greens, also turned on Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD), who soon has to win a state election. Hendrik Wüst (CDU), Weil’s colleague from North Rhine-Westphalia, and also the DGB boss Yasmin Fahimi. A billion-dollar package is being put together to relieve people of the burden of rising energy prices – but how? There is no shortage of ideas.
Most recently, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had promised at least a lower VAT on gas. It will apply from October 1st and gas customers will take at least part of the burden that will come their way from then on: A surcharge that is intended to help struggling gas importers – and for which households have to spend several hundred euros a year, depending on gas consumption. Scholz himself had announced that it would not stop there. Another relief package is in the works.
And that’s urgent, says Bavaria’s Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU). “People must not be made any more insecure, but urgently and promptly need targeted relief,” he said Süddeutsche Zeitung. So far, the coalition in Berlin has “knitted only a patchwork of one-off payments and isolated individual measures”. Electricity and energy taxes would also have to be reduced “to the European minimum in the long term,” he suggests.
The head of the German Trade Union Confederation, Yasmin Fahimi, sees it similarly. It is right to reduce VAT on gas, she said at the weekend. “But why isn’t the electricity tax finally reduced to the minimum permissible in Europe?” The pressure is not only on those in need, “but also across the board”.
Students and pensioners forgotten so far?
But there is disagreement about that. Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil complains that the previous aid packages have helped families with children well. For low earners, however, the effect is below average. “It can’t stay like this,” he told the newspapers of the Funke media group. North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst also called for more targeted help. Students and pensioners have been forgotten so far. “The state’s answer to the situation of pensioners cannot be the board,” said the CDU politician picture on sunday. “That would be cynical.” So it can hardly be conveyed that pensioners are excluded from state energy money. The 300-euro lump sum is paid to employees via the pay slip. Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) had so far only been reluctant to comment on energy price support for pensioners.
Lindner had recently proposed a compensation of the so-called cold progression in order to relieve the – as he says – “working middle”. This is intended to compensate for the fact that employees have to pay disproportionately more income tax due to wage increases as a result of inflation. But the criticism does not stop there. After Economics Minister Robert Habeck, Family Minister Lisa Paus (both Greens) also expressed reservations at the weekend. It is “rather unlikely” that wages will rise at the same rate as inflation, she said on Deutschlandfunk. The hardest hit by higher energy prices are families with low incomes, who are already particularly burdened. “I’ll say it: They’re the first,” said Paus. In addition, it is now also about social cohesion. She thinks “that in this situation everyone has to look again at what they can contribute,” said the Greens politician.