As of: February 22, 2024, 5:30 p.m
By: Georg Anastasiadis
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Veronika Grimm, government advisor as a member of the “Wirtschaftsweise”, is pressured by her colleagues to withdraw.
A comment from Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
© Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa/Klaus Haag
The way businesswoman Veronika Grimm is being forced to retreat by her colleagues is a case of bullying that could hardly be worse.
A comment by Georg Anastasiadis.
This has never happened before in the history of the German “economic wise men”: four of them write a letter to the fifth, which, as luck would have it, usually has a different opinion on economic policy issues than the rest of the government advisors (and also the traffic light government himself).
They are urging her to withdraw and, to be on the safe side, are also forwarding her letter to several federal ministers.
The letter falls from some desk straight into the arms of a journalist.
More bullying is hardly possible.
Grimm's main crime is obviously that she is in favor of maintaining the debt brake
It is difficult to see the intrigue against Veronika Grimm as anything other than a pretty bare-bones attempt to get rid of an unpopular economics professor - whose main crime is obviously that she advocates maintaining the debt brake, which two of the three traffic light parties are known to hate like hell the holy water.
The justification that Grimm should avoid conflicts of interest as the future supervisory board member of Siemens Energy seems pretextual, especially since Veronika Grimm would not be the first businesswoman to have a supervisory board mandate and some of the professors would certainly benefit from a little more practical relevance.
It would be better if the four remaining wise men and especially their boss Monika Schnitzer had the confidence to tolerate a different opinion in their advisory committee.
The same applies to the traffic light government.
But she is already so wounded that it is difficult for her to grow to this size.
The appeal by the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck that the wise should be “smart enough” to avoid conflicts of interest, and the simultaneous suggestion from the FDP-led Finance Ministry that there were no legal reasons against a double mandate, shows that the traffic lights are divided.
What else.
George Anastasiadis