The decision threw into disarray budget negotiations taking place this week within Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way ruling coalition, whose popularity has slumped as Europe’s biggest economy teeters close to another recession…
The 60 billion euros had been earmarked for initiatives such as making buildings more energy efficient and subsidising renewable electricity and chips production, as well as supporting energy-intensive companies. Lindner said moves to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy use in the building sector would be excluded from the freeze.
Germany has the largest economy in Europe. Much of what happens there also affects other EU nations, and therefore economic developments in Germany might have worldwide implications.
Germany, with its Energiewende program, has gone more heavily into renewable sources of energy (mostly wind and solar) than other nations its size. The realities of the shortcomings of those intermittent renewables are now being felt. It turns out, trying to go 100% renewables is a lot harder than previously thought. They only made their situation worse by completely shutting down a significant nuclear power program.
The example of Germany should be a lesson to other industrialized nations. Will those other nations learn? We’ll see.
The current government came to power in 2021 following a historic ruling by the country’s constitutional court, which said the German fundamental law protected the “intertemporal freedom” of future generations to enjoy a healthy climate. Buoyed by the widespread success of the youth-led climate movement, the government that took office that year had both the legal mandate and the political will to engage in ambitious climate action. The big goal: slashing emissions by 65% relative to 1990 levels by 2030 before achieving climate neutrality by 2045.
Today, those lofty goals seem out of reach. Projections indicate that Germany will miss its 2030 climate target by around 200 million tonnes of CO2. Add recent budgetary woes and trade tensions with China, which could slow down the country’s switch to solar, and the gap is expected to widen even further.
What did the government do in response? It watered down the climate law, removing triggers for climate action that were initially envisioned…
Making Germany’s set of climate laws fit for the country’s court-mandated climate litigation has proven politically untenable.
An interesting observation on current German stability.
Fat pension jump: Why all government ministers want to hold on right now
After the government’s debt tricks, which resulted in a devastating ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany is deep in a financial crisis: the 2023 budget is blocked, as are shadow budgets worth tens of billions of euros.
More and more people are asking themselves: Why doesn’t anyone in charge take the consequences of this misery and resign? One reason could be that December 8th is a date with gold in the mouth for ministers.
On December 8th, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), his head of the Chancellery Wolfgang Schmidt and the 15 ministers will have been in office for exactly two years. On this very day they will have accumulated enough service time to have a pension of €4,660 per month safely in their pockets.
After a constitutional court ruling last month the cancelled 60 billion euros of earmarked debt, the federal government last week announced plans to save around 900 million euros annually in subsidies for farmers.
In some German regions, far-right groups managed to infiltrate, and in some instances take charge of, farmers’ protests against the government’s subsidy cuts announced at the end of last year.
At midday in Dresden, the state capital of Saxony, figures from the ranks of the Free Saxons, a small rightwing extremist party founded in 2021, spoke at a rally outside the Semperoper opera house, the broadcaster MDR reported.
The Third Way, a neo-N@zi party formed by former members of the rightwing extremist NPD in 2013, made a call on its website for its supporters to join the protesting farmers.
Regional delegates for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland reportedly joined a farmers’ protest in Stuttgart, in south-west Germany.
The central German farmers’ association has repeatedly tried to distance itself from far-right parties who have cheered on its call for protests.
