"I am confident that we will soon reach an agreement on basic pensions," said acting SPD chairman Malu Dreyer on Sunday the newspapers of the Funke group. But Dreyer's optimism was suddenly slowed down. The coalition committee scheduled for Monday, where the topic should finally be negotiated off the table, was unexpectedly canceled.
At the summit meeting of party and faction leaders of CDU, CSU and SPD actually the ability of the Grand Coalition to act was to be proven. Negotiators from both parties tried last week to overcome the last hurdles and to calculate the costs of the different basic pension models, whose introduction and implementation has been the subject of intense debate for months.
In May, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) submitted a draft according to which around three million people were to receive a basic pension. He expected it to cost 4.8 billion euros per annum by 2025.
The topic threatens to become a test of the Great Coalition. If there is no agreement, those forces in the SPD who have longed for an end to the governing coalition, which has been perceived as crippling, feel encouraged. On the Union side, there is some irritation that the SPD will come too far in the face of a compromise on the basic pension question if the future of the GroKo appears to be insecure anyway.
Spahn rejects report of agreement
As a compromise had lately emerged to make the payment of the basic pension on the respective income of retirees, but not by an examination of the need, in which their entire assets would be included.
At the center of the dispute between the Union and the SPD is the question of which financial conditions retirees with low retirement pensions have to meet in order to receive the additional state benefits proposed by the SPD. The Union argues that the basic pension should only be paid after examining individual needs. The SPD rejects such an examination, which increases the circle of claimants and thus the costs significantly.
The first signals that an agreement could still fail, there was already on Saturday. For trouble in the CDU caused a message of the "Bild" newspaper, according to which the Union had broken in the means test. Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) described the report on Twitter as false and gave conditions for a basic pension agreement. The first condition is a "hard income test as a means test," wrote Spahn. It should ensure "that only pensioners are supported who, despite more than 35 years of work, have very little to live on".
As a second condition Spahn called a limit on the total expenditure, but did not mention a specific sum. Third, he called for measures to stimulate the economy, such as a reduction in corporate tax to compensate for the cost of the basic pension.
Exactly to this cost issue it should go on Monday evening in the chancellery. In the afternoon, the basic pensions working group was to meet first and draw up a proposal, which was then to be finalized and decided on in the evening. That will not happen now. It takes a little more time, coalition circles say.
