Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended the compromise of the coalition on the basic pension. The land rent had also become a "credibility issue" for her, Merkel said on the Employers 'Day of the Confederation of Employers' Associations in Berlin.
Merkel pointed out that the CDU had already announced in the legislative period from 2009 to 2013 under the then Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen a Lebensleistungsrente. "Watching people say and say in the fourth legislative period, let's just say that next time around, they'll probably get their ground rent, and eventually they'll make a fool of themselves," she said.
Nobody had blackmailed the other, she said, dismissing criticism of part of the Union's economic wing at the SPD. Among other things, the chairman of the Junge Union, Tilman Kuban, had expressed fundamental concerns about a ground rent.
According to the Chancellor, economic growth in Germany was for many years higher than wage growth. But if the result is that someone who has worked for 35 years is just like someone who has not worked for an hour, "then you have a problem of justice and you must have an answer to that."
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The leaders of the grand coalition had settled their dispute over the basic pension on Sunday. The new service should be introduced on 1 January 2021. It is about a supplement to the pension for those who have paid for decades in the statutory pension insurance and still receive pensions below the basic security.
An income test is planned through automatic data reconciliation and no longer the needs test rejected by the SPD.
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