United in government responsibility for five years, Hamburg's SPD and Greens are showing their teeth before the general election. Mayor Tschentscher and his green challenger Fegebank wear hard bandages during the TV duel.
Hamburg (dpa) - Five days before the general election in Hamburg, the dispute in the red-green coalition in the "Cum-Ex" scandal has become apparent.
Mayor Peter Tschentscher of the SPD again rejected any accusations of political interference in the dealings with the tax authorities with the suspected Warburg Bank. His Greens challenger, the second mayor Katharina Fegebank, asked the Social Democrats in the TV duel of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk to explain why a tax recovery of 47 million euros was not demanded in 2016. Tschentscher did not want to comment on the specific case because of tax secrecy and referred to ongoing legal proceedings.
Fegebank avoided the question of whether she believed the mayor. "We talked about it today in the Senate. And it is important that there are still questions." The Greens had therefore asked the SPD to "check whether Warburg's tax secrecy could be lifted to some extent in order to actually hold a special meeting of the Committee on Budgets". They see an imperative public interest that would be a prerequisite for loosening tax secrecy under the tax code.
There is no outside influence on Hamburg's financial administration, said Tschentscher. "You can be sure that I have been a financial senator for seven years: our tax offices and our tax administration do this strictly according to legal criteria. In accordance with the law, they reclaim everything that has been wrongly refunded."
Three hours before the duel of the mayor candidates, the top candidates of the opposition parties had argued in a separate one-hour live broadcast of the NDR. Marcus Weinberg (CDU), Cansu Özdemir (left), Anna von Treuenfels-Frowein (FDP) and Dirk Nockemann (AfD) also urged clarification in the "cum-ex" affair.
According to a new poll, the SPD is clearly ahead of the general election. Despite high losses compared to the 2015 election (45.6 percent), it would remain the strongest with 38 percent, according to the Hamburg trend of the polling institute Insa on behalf of the "Bild" newspaper. The Greens ruling with the SPD came in second place with 23 percent (2015: 12.3 percent). Third place goes to the CDU with 13 percent (2015: 15.9 percent). The left could roughly confirm their result of 2015 (8.5 percent) with 8 percent, the AfD could improve to 7 percent (2015: 6.1 percent), the FDP would have to worry about entering the parliament with 5 percent ( 2015: 7.4 percent).
This Sunday, around 1.3 million voters in Hamburg are called to elect a new citizenry.