Chancellor Scholz used his authority to set guidelines and abruptly ended the nuclear power plant dispute in his cabinet. A powerful tool that is rarely used – and for good reason.
The Chancellor’s instruction sounds like a fist on the table: the operating times of all three remaining nuclear power plants in Germany will be extended until mid-April at the latest. Prime Minister Olaf Scholz put an end to the deadlocked dispute between his coalition partners. In doing so, he referred to the directive competence. The instrument is the basis of the Federal Chancellor’s power, but is only used in exceptional cases.
The Basic Law assures the Federal Chancellor that he can determine the “guidelines of politics” and bear responsibility for them. “The federal government decides on differences of opinion between the federal ministers,” it says in Article 65. Without the authority to set guidelines, the head of government would only have the role of mediator in conflicts between ministers. Conversely, this means that the government was unable to find an agreement.
It is very rare for a chancellor to justify his decision with the authority to set guidelines. Only Konrad Adenauer, the first German Chancellor, made regular use of it. Helmut Schmidt, head of government from 1974 to 1982, even rejected it. He sees it as his duty to find compromises, he once explained. Scholz’s predecessor, Angela Merkel, threatened to be involved in the asylum dispute with Horst Seehofer in 2018. In fact, Merkel only applied the “Chancellor Principle” once in 16 years of government. In 2016, she decided that criminal investigations against satirist Jan Böhmermann for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may be allowed.
What counts as a guideline is not clearly regulated. “It’s not about concrete factual decisions, but rather about what you would call the basic principle or basic strategy of the government,” says political scientist Stefan Marschall ntv.de. “Even smaller decisions can be included in the policy competence if the chancellor sees them as dealing with a central issue,” said the professor of political science at the University of Düsseldorf.
However, it is in the nature of a coalition to find a compromise on important decisions. Conflicts are usually not settled by the decision of a single person. “The authority to set guidelines stands like a threat in the room, but it is only rarely carried out,” explains Marschall. At the beginning of August, Scholz also said about the authority to set guidelines: “It’s good that I have it. But of course not in the form that I write someone a letter: ‘Please, Mr. Minister, do the following.'”
About two months later he did exactly that. Shortly before that, the chancellor’s meetings with Economics Minister Robert Habeck and Finance Minister Christian Lindner came to nothing, and the fronts at the traffic lights seemed hardened. To get out of this impasse, the authority to issue guidelines was the only way, says Marschall. “The party leaders of the Greens and the FDP were able to save face and point out that the chancellor had unpacked his instruments of power.” At the same time, the decision is clear evidence of problems in the coalition. In this respect, the competence to issue directives is based on a contradiction: it grants the chancellor power, but he reveals weakness as soon as he uses it.
Once the word of power has been spoken, the ministers are bound by it. Even public statements must be in accordance with the given guidelines. If a member of the government does not like the Chancellor’s directive, the only option is to resign. “But then you would be very close to the end of a coalition,” says Marschall.
What is special about Chancellor Scholz’s nuclear power plant decision is that it is directly linked to a change in the law. The government can present the corresponding draft, but it will be decided in parliament. The “chancellor principle” doesn’t bother the MPs there very much – so Scholz has to hope for the votes of the two smaller traffic light parties. The Greens, in particular, who only had their position for restricted continued operation of nuclear power plants approved at the party congress at the weekend, reacted cautiously to his word of power. Habeck has already appealed to his party friends not to jeopardize the government in this situation.
It is therefore about more than the continued operation of nuclear power plants. For Scholz there is a risk of being rebuked by the Bundestag. “The chancellor would then still have the opportunity to combine the question of power with the question of confidence,” said Marschall. However, the expert considers such a showdown to be unlikely. “I think the parliamentary groups will try to find a way to make this law possible.” The pressure on the traffic light, whose head of government had to use his last resort after just ten months, is likely to be correspondingly high.
