Can the traffic light plans be financed?
At one point in the coalition agreement, lawyers are now expressing doubts.
And the future Minister of Transport is also facing headwinds from the Greens.
Berlin - Shortly before the traffic lights begin, trouble from two directions threatens: There are doubts as to whether a planned reserve for climate investments complies with constitutional law - and internal coalition gossip is looming over the topic of diesel.
According to the coalition agreement, the traffic light government wants to save up to 60 billion euros for future climate investments.
This should be made possible by a financial policy trick: the debt brake will be suspended until 2023 due to the corona pandemic.
The future government consisting of the SPD, FDP and the Greens wants to use this period to replenish the Energy and Climate Fund (EKF) - in order to use it to finance climate investments in the following years.
According to
Handelsblatt
Kyrill-Alexander Schwarz, Professor of Public Law at the University of Würzburg,
this is a “fraudulent label”
.
Traffic light with unconstitutional climate plan in the coalition agreement?
The idea generator is already distancing itself
"The provision for climate protection measures is clearly unconstitutional," said Christoph Gröpl, constitutional and administrative lawyer at Saarland University. The debt brake anchored in the Basic Law enables the suspension only for debts to combat acute crises. "In my opinion, future-oriented climate investments no longer have anything to do with the pandemic," said Hanno Kube, professor at Heidelberg University of the newspaper. "The debt brake has been suspended due to the Corona crisis and has therefore enabled the federal government to incur significantly more debt."
And the originator of the idea is said to have distanced himself from it: Clemens Fuest, President of the Ifo Institute, told the
Handelsblatt
: "Above all, I asked various constitutional lawyers who had doubts."
Greens and FDP facing diesel dispute?
The traffic light coalition could quickly slide into climate disagreement
Another message casts doubt on the unity of the traffic light coalition.
The designated Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP)
warned
Bild
on Saturday of
additional burdens for diesel vehicles and their drivers and said: "The FDP will ensure that higher energy taxes on diesel fuels are offset by lower vehicle taxes." Attention is directed to the small companies that are still dependent on diesel vehicles.
Wissing named delivery services and craftsmen as specific examples.
Özdemir (Greens) insists on the traffic light contract: “Period.
End."
"The coalition agreement does not give that," said the green traffic expert Stefan Gelbhaar the
mirror.
Cem Özdemir, most recently chairman of the Bundestag's transport committee, said on Deutschlandfunk on Sunday that it was not a question of extending the fossil fuel burner, but of ending it. "It's in the coalition agreement," said the Minister-designate for Agriculture. "15 million electric vehicles by 2030, fully electric, no hybrid, that means that by 2030 the end of the fossil fuel will be sealed," he said. “That is the coalition mandate. Period. End."
"The fact that the designated transport minister is already calling himself an advocate for cars is a blow to the traffic light government, which has not even started work," said the Green parliamentary group leader in the Lower Saxony state parliament, Julia Willie Hamburg.
"Such acting is polarizing and not uniting." (
AFP / kat
)
