NAfter his announcement of an early end to the price caps for electricity and gas, FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner has come under criticism from his coalition partner SPD. The co-chair of the Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil, said on Sunday evening on the ARD program “Anne Will”: “To unilaterally announce the end without us having discussed it together: It doesn’t work that way.” The SPD wants it Klingbeil emphasized that there is security if prices shoot up.
Lindner explained in an interview on Friday that the state price caps for electricity and gas would expire at the end of the year and not at the end of March, as was last planned. The background is the budget ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court on November 15th, which means the government is now missing billions. Numerous other projects are also affected by this.
“We shouldn’t have this difficult debate in the next few weeks about individual announcements from individual ministers,” warned Klingbeil. “We now need an overall package. This needs to be worked on and when it is finished it can be announced.”
The Left criticizes the debt brake as a brake on investment
In a Bundestag motion, the left-wing faction is now calling for the debt brake to be suspended for 2024 as well. “The cancellation of expenditure from the special funds as a consequence of the Karlsruhe ruling would dramatically worsen the economic recession and the investment backlog,” says the motion, from which the newspapers quoted by the editorial network Germany (RND) on Monday.
In addition, the uncertainty about the state’s fiscal options affects the ability to intervene in economic crises and to stabilize the economy and support citizens with guarantees, investments or direct subsidies.
Parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch told the RND that the debt brake is a brake on investment that endangers the future of the country and deepens social division. What is necessary is not only the suspension of the debt brake, but also a taxation of “obscene wealth”, for example through a reform of the inheritance tax.
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