Enlarge image
Climate, Hartz IV, money: until Annalena Baerbock (Greens), Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Christian Lindner (FDP) are part of the same government, a lot has to be clarified
Photo:
Chris Emil Janssen / imago images / Chris Emil Janssen
First it was probed, then probed - and now it is time to negotiate.
Almost a month after the general election in Germany, the SPD, Greens and FDP begin their coalition negotiations on Thursday to form a joint federal government.
A total of 22 working groups with specialist politicians will then negotiate the details of a coalition agreement in the coming weeks.
The SPD, Greens and FDP are striving to form a joint government before Christmas.
It would be the first so-called traffic light coalition at the federal level.
The sticking points in the search for a program for a traffic light coalition: There could be a catch, especially in differences in tax and financial policy as well as in the right path to climate protection.
The SPD, Greens and FDP are thus heading for difficult negotiations about the financial viability of their projects.
First results in the exploratory paper
The traffic light partners have already cleared some hurdles with their twelve-page exploratory paper.
The statutory minimum wage is supposed to rise once to twelve euros per hour.
Hartz IV is to be replaced by a citizen's benefit.
The voting age for the Bundestag and European Parliament is to be reduced to 16 years.
400,000 new apartments are targeted every year.
There should be no pension cuts, and the retirement age will not be raised.
The plan is to start partially funded the statutory pension.
There will be no speed limit on motorways.
Where does the money for the investments come from?
The partners want to invest in climate protection, digitization and education.
An additional amount of 50 billion euros per year is under discussion.
At the same time, taxes should not be increased and the debt brake should be adhered to.
There are likely to be tough negotiations about other financing channels, but simply relying on additional tax revenues is not enough.
Public investment companies and federal companies could take out loans; they do not belong to the core budgets of the federal government.
In addition, the partners want to put unnecessary and climate-damaging subsidies to the test.
The details are likely to be fierce.
Early coal phase-out
The expansion of renewable energies is to be accelerated "drastically", the SPD, Greens and FDP agree on this. They have already struck a few stakes, for example with a solar roof requirement for new commercial buildings and an accelerated phase-out of coal, which should "ideally" succeed by 2030. For the Green Youth and the climate protection activists, the proposals do not go far enough, even with the federal states with coal mining areas it should not be possible to settle this conflict-free.
The DGB chairman Reiner Hoffmann also sees a faster coal phase-out only under certain conditions as possible.
"If a future traffic light coalition wants to move forward from coal-fired power generation, the pace of the energy transition must be massively increased and the relocation of jobs and added value in the districts accelerated," he told the German press agency.
Rising energy prices
Prices at gas stations or for heating are skyrocketing.
Here the potential coalition partners have to find ways to buffer the increase for the population without this standing in the way of the climate targets.
Who will what
The distribution of posts usually comes at the end of coalition negotiations.
At least the key position of finance minister is already being publicly debated.
Politicians from the FDP and the Greens had brought their respective party leaders Christian Lindner and Robert Habeck into play.
The Greens co-chair Annalena Baerbock underlined on Wednesday evening in the ARD “Tagesthemen” that they had agreed to first tighten the “content-related guard rails” - and only then to clarify the departmental issues.
She insisted on equal representation in the government.
SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz had always stressed during the election campaign that his cabinet would be made up of women and men in equal parts.
That was "not a sure-fire success," warned Baerbock.
What still needs to be talked about
The exploratory paper has remained vague in some areas, such as transport or foreign and security policy. The director of the Institute for the German Economy, Michael Hüther, sees an immense need for action in social insurance. "That is a central topic and unfortunately it is also the greatest disappointment in the exploratory paper," he told the dpa. Demographic aging was not taken into account at all in the paper. »But we will have to record a loss of over three million people in the labor force in the next decade up to 2030. This leads to completely different burdens with a simultaneous increase in the number of retirees. "
The youth organizations of the three parties are also not yet satisfied.
The young socialists insist on the expansion of local transport, lower ticket prices and a pay-as-you-go apprenticeship guarantee.
The Green Youth wants to step up in terms of climate protection, and at the start of the coalition negotiations, they are also calling for the previous basic security to be withdrawn.
"We expect a clear departure from the Hartz IV system from the coalition negotiations," said the federal spokeswoman for the green youth organization, Sarah-Lee Heinrich, of the German press agency.
“It's not the name that has to change, but the system”.
The Young Liberals want to facilitate wealth creation, legalize euthanasia, abolish the abortion clause in the penal code and full legalization of cannabis.
muk / dpa