After Chancellor Scholz presented his “double boom” from the end of the gas surcharge and an energy price brake last week, the guests of the ARD program Anne Will also dealt with it on Sunday evening. Particularly impressive: the founder of Germany’s first food bank.
It all began in 1993. That’s when Sabine Werth and her initiative group “Berliner Frauen e.V.” the first table in Germany. There are now 960 panels nationwide with around 2,000 distribution points. It was clear to the founders: they cannot fight poverty in Germany. But they can help alleviate them. That is why they support people who have little money with food. But the Tafel suffer from two problems: in the last nine months, the number of people seeking help has doubled, and at the same time there are fewer and fewer food donations.
Many people who have to use the boards are desperate. More and more guests are coming who never expected to have to ask for their help, says Werth. She is a guest on the ARD talk show “Anne Will” on Sunday evening. There the guests will once again talk about the current energy crisis and whether the electricity and gas price brake announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday will actually reach consumers. Many of Sabine Werth’s guests and her volunteers “don’t know what’s to come,” says Sabine Werth. More and more people need her help because they don’t earn enough and now have to save to get through the winter. These are often small business owners who have had to close. “People don’t know how they’re going to manage that in the next few months. There will be a lot of fear,” predicts Werth.
As for the “double boom” announced by Chancellor Scholz last Thursday, she says: “There are certain people who can develop hope when certain promises are made. But there are certainly many who would rather wait and see.” The housing benefit, for example, which is to be expanded on January 1st, is problematic. About 1.4 million new housing benefit recipients could be added. But it is unclear where the staff who will process the relevant applications should come from. Werth wonders when the housing benefit will be paid out.
SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert and FDP faction leader Christian Dürr can understand the problems of Sabine Werth’s guests. The federal government has set up a commission that will present results in two weeks at the latest. They should then be implemented as quickly as possible, explains Kühnert. The government has set itself four goals: the electricity and gas price brake, the protection of gas importers and the support of small and medium-sized companies. Kühnert: “We now have to prove that we are not only able to raise and provide a lot of money on the capital markets, but also to bring this money to the people in a targeted, legally valid and targeted manner to the needy groups. We are convinced that that we can too.” However, gas consumption is still too high at the moment. “That’s why we have to take much bigger steps when it comes to savings,” warns Kühnert.
It is to be expected that Kühnert and Dürr will almost pull together. However, Dürr is dissatisfied with the energy mix and is calling for the lifetime of the nuclear power plants still on the grid to be extended until 2024. Andreas Jung’s criticism is also comparatively mild. However, the energy policy spokesman for the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag criticizes very sharply that the federal government is reacting too late to the crisis. “We want to wait and see what comes out of the energy brake,” says Jung skeptically. The federal government caused chaos with the gas levy. “Now we expect the double boom to become concrete,” said the CDU politician. The federal government held press conferences and a closed conference, and is now setting up a commission. The war in Ukraine has been raging for eight months, prices are now exploding and the federal government has no answers.
Kühnert rejects this: There were three aid packages, the increase in the minimum wage came into force on Saturday, the extended housing allowance and the citizen’s allowance would come in January. Dürr adds that the federal government is now getting to the root of the problem, namely the prices that nobody can afford.
But Sabine Werth from the Berliner Tafel sees another problem. She observes that her guests’ solidarity with the refugees from Ukraine is waning. “People have the feeling that they would get more food if the refugees weren’t there. The resentment is growing,” says Werth. She criticizes the first relief packages: they were not targeted enough. For example, most Hartz 4 recipients would not have benefited from the tank discount in the summer because they don’t have cars. “It creates dissatisfaction across the board.” That’s why measures are important to win back the people who are now demonstrating on the streets and falling for the “populists of the nation”. Her solution: “We have to put together targeted packages, and that’s where politicians have a lot to do.”
Kühnert agrees. At the moment, however, he is concerned with implementing the current measures as soon as possible. “The measures will be noticeable to the population very quickly,” he promises.
