If you walk through the corridors on the eighth floor of the Brussels branch of the European Parliament, you can see Sven Giegold’s office from afar. Its door is guarded by two huge green fabric polar bears. However, Giegold, one of the best-known German MEPs, is likely to move soon: The future climate protection and economics minister Robert Habeck of the Greens wants to guide his party friend Giegold into the newly tailored ministry as a civil servant. The prerequisite is that the party base approves the coalition agreement and the personnel sheet, but that is considered certain.
Farewell to parliament “is not easy for me,” writes Giegold his website, but in the new government there is a task “which is of the greatest importance for the future”: the climate-friendly restructuring of the economy and society. Top civil servant in a federal ministry – that would be another remarkable change in the life of the 52-year-old economist. This is how Giegold began his political engagement as a youngster in the nature conservation movement in his native Lower Saxony. As a student he flirted briefly with anarchism, at the turn of the millennium he was one of the co-founders of the globalization-critical alliance Attac in Germany.
Giegold quickly becomes the face of the movement without being its chairman, because such offices do not exist. The now discontinued magazine neon in 2003 named him the “most important young German”. The Left Party wants to win him as a candidate for the 2005 Bundestag election, but Giegold waves it away. He prefers to become a member of the Greens in 2008. When the financial crisis came to a head, Giegold, the green economic politician and Attac co-founder, was a popular talk show guest. In 2009 he moved into a safe place on the list in the European Parliament; here he is the economic and financial policy spokesman for the European Greens as well as the spokesman for the German Greens delegation. Looking back, Giegold says that a lot can be achieved in the “EU Parliament for the whole of Europe, which is often underestimated by the public”.
The German is one of those parliamentarians who like to express themselves often and often on very different topics. But one of his main focuses is the fight against corporate tax tricks. Giegold has been dealing with the problem for a long time; In 2002 he co-founded the Tax Justice Network, an international tax justice organization. The current year, Giegold’s last in the European Parliament, was a good one in that respect. Because after years of struggle, the Council of Ministers, the decision-making body of the states, and the EU Parliament cleared the way for a transparency law: In the future, corporations will have to use the Internet to find out how much revenue and profit they are generating in which country and how much tax they are paying. Citizens, journalists and groups like the Tax Justice Network can understand whether companies are deliberately shifting profits to low-tax countries – such machinations then lead to bad headlines.
He calls for a wealth tax and more redistribution
Giegold describes this as a “breakthrough for more tax justice” – unusually euphoric words for the always critical and complaining Green politician. But it is also a personal victory: “I have been personally committed to this law for a long time,” he says.
At the coalition talks in Berlin, Giegold was part of the core negotiation team and the finance and budget working group. As State Secretary he will “probably” be responsible, among other things, for drafting stricter laws on arms exports, he writes on his website. He will also be responsible for the European-political aspects of his ministry’s work – his experiences from Strasbourg and Brussels will certainly help him.
Giegold is overall satisfied with the coalition agreement, but calls it “a great disappointment” that the three parties SPD, FDP and Greens could not agree on more redistribution to reduce social inequality. “A redistributive tax policy and the consistent regulation of the financial markets are missing in the traffic light package,” he writes. Giegold pleads for a wealth tax, but the FDP has resisted tax increases, he complains. Nevertheless, the politician is apparently in good spirits: He closes the long statements about the job change on his website “with hopeful greetings”.