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Chancellery: This is where Olaf Scholz and the prime ministers meet on Tuesday
Photo: Papp / STPP / IMAGO
The commission will meet for the second time on Tuesday: under the direction of economist Veronika Grimm, the President of the Federation of German Industries, Siegfried Russwurm, and the head of the Mining, Chemical and Energy Union, Michael Vassiliaadis, 18 experts are working on how the the gas price brake planned by the traffic light coalition should actually work.
At the same time, the federal government is working on the design of the second central instrument, the electricity price brake.
No more than half a magic feat
But when the Prime Ministers meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholz - also on Tuesday - they would like to have concrete results.
Because the so-called defense shield with a volume of up to 200 billion euros, which the coalition government wants to use to get Germany through the energy and price crisis as lightly as possible, announced by Social Democrat Scholz last Thursday as a "double boom", affects the state leaders at least as much as the federal government .
What Scholz, his Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck from the Greens and FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner pulled out of a hat a few days ago is, from the Prime Minister's point of view, no more than half a magic trick.
You ask: How is that supposed to work in the end?
The states unanimously say that mid-October – when the commission will present its results according to the current government schedule – is too late.
That was, it can be heard, also to some extent a consensus in the talks between the prime ministers on Sunday evening as part of the official celebrations for the Day of Unity in Erfurt.
Eleven country heads are said to have attended the traditional dinner on the eve of October 3rd, this time at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar.
The host and Thuringian Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) said afterwards that it was "happy, friendly, but clearly spoken".
Of course, the warnings to the federal government differ in tone depending on party affiliation - but they all push the pace.
In the case of Lower Saxony's head of government, Stephan Weil from the SPD, who has been head of the conference of prime ministers for six months since October 1, it sounds like this with a view to the measures announced: "But we also need clarity quickly about how this cap is to be implemented." More clearly becomes Bavaria's CSU Prime Minister Markus Söder.
"If the help comes too late, a number of companies are no longer viable and many citizens are in financial difficulties," he tweeted on Monday afternoon.
Things are getting a little more complicated because next Sunday there will be elections in Lower Saxony - the new MPK boss and thus country coordinator Weil is also fighting for his prime ministerial office at the same time.
According to polls, the SPD is only just ahead of the CDU of its challenger Bernd Althusmann.
And he is also urging the federal government to hurry.
"We finally need clear statements and reliability in gas and electricity prices and a secure energy supply," says Althusmann.
Citizens and companies want planning security as soon as possible in order to get through the winter - but for the further negotiations between the federal and state governments on the distribution of costs for crisis policy, what the gas and price brakes look like in concrete terms is decisive.
Depending on where the prices will be afterwards, the costs for the countries will also increase in many areas, for example in local transport, for running hospitals or for accommodating refugees.
Even the SPD Prime Minister of Saarland, Anke Rehlinger, told the Funke media group that the federal states would have to shoulder some of the new burdens, but they would not have to go along with everything.
Many formulations in the template are not yet unified
So it's no wonder that the current draft resolution for the federal-state meeting on Tuesday, available to SPIEGEL, contains either a wording in brackets or sometimes two passages marked in this way on many points, but especially on the crucial ones.
In brackets means that no agreement has yet been reached.
The template comes from the Chancellery, many of the state requirements are only included in the paper in this form.
Basically, there is massive dissent on four points:
When it comes to housing benefit, where citizens will receive more grants from January 1, 2023, the federal states would like the federal government to continue to take over the whole issue in the future.
When it comes to expanding and modernizing local public transport, the federal states want significantly more funding from the federal government than has been promised so far.
In view of high inflation and galloping energy prices, hospital management is becoming more and more expensive for the federal states - here, too, corresponding additional allocations are desired.
The head of the German Hospital Society, Gerald Gass, had previously warned SPIEGEL of the emergency in the clinic.
The high number of refugees from the Ukraine plus others who have fled to Germany and other people who are expected to seek protection from Russia poses great challenges for the federal states and local authorities, and they are demanding immediate additional services from the federal government.
According to SPIEGEL information, finance minister Lindner's announcement to the states that he would only start talks about financing in the coming weeks met with a lack of understanding on the part of the states.
At the same time, even the prime ministers of the Union emphasize that they want to negotiate as constructively as possible with the SPD chancellor in this serious crisis.
The details of his defense screen are now all the more important.
