German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gathered his coalition on Sunday evening to try to ease growing tensions between government partners, which threaten to turn into a crisis.
The disputes for weeks between the Liberals of the FDP, the ecologists and the social democrats of the chancellor, forming the government coalition, concern the climate as well as the financing of the army, transport infrastructure or the 2024 budget.
Beyond that, it is a growing loss of mutual trust between the three partners which is beginning to cause concern and which ends up slowing down many major projects in Europe’s leading economy.
“Wherever you look, there seems to be fire in the government”, analyzes the weekly Der Spiegel on Sunday, “we argue over priorities, we accuse each other and everyone is frustrated by the failure to find compromises.
“The house of the coalition is burning down,” summarizes the popular daily Bild.
These domestic tensions have in the meantime overflowed in Brussels, where they have, for example, led to Berlin taking its European partners backwards in early March by blocking at the last moment a regulation providing for the reduction of CO2 emissions from new vehicles to zero. A compromise was finally found on Saturday.
It is therefore to a session of collective therapy that the members of this tripartite coalition, unprecedented in Germany, submitted Sunday evening to the chancellery. The results of their negotiations could not be made public until Monday morning.
“The citizens are waiting for the coalition to achieve results,” warned Dirk Wiese, a Social Democrat leader, in Spiegel.
Objective: to restore order in order to stem growing unpopularity from which the conservative opposition, at the top of the polls, and the AfD (far right), now third party in Germany, according to several studies, take advantage.
The Liberals hold the Ministry of Finance and see themselves as guarantors of budgetary discipline. One of their leaders, Christoph Meyer, criticized the other two parties for “an addiction to public spending”, in the newspapers of the Funke press group.
“Sometimes you have to snatch the bottle of schnapps out of an alcoholic’s mouth,” he said.
On the climate, Greens and FDP have been exposing their disagreements for weeks on the subject of combustion engines, the gradual ban on oil or gas heating or the priority to be given to investments in rail or highways.
It was the Ecologist Minister for the Economy and the Climate, Robert Habeck, who set fire to the powder. “Only one party represents progress and the others impediment,” the number 2 of the government got carried away on Tuesday.
This trained philosopher also criticizes the government for “not sufficiently” fulfilling its mission “to bring something to the people, to Germany” and to the climate.
The country has certainly reached its goal of limiting CO2 emissions in 2022, partly thanks to the energy crisis, but there is still a long way to go to achieve carbon neutrality in 2045.
Mr. Habeck particularly criticizes his liberal allies for slowing down his project, which leaked to the press, to ban new oil or gas heaters in 2024.
The tension is such that FDP Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki went so far as to say, before apologizing, that Mr. Habeck shared with Russian President Vladimir Putin “a similar conviction that the state, the leader, the elected knows better than people what is good for them”.
The SPD urges calm. But the Chancellor, renowned for maneuvering in the face of difficulties rather than deciding on the spot, is having a hard time a year and a half after coming to power to gain the upper hand over his restless partners.
“We need leadership more than ever and Olaf Scholz does not show it, because he lets it happen,” criticized Carsten Linnemann, a leader of the conservative opposition.
26/03/2023 20:42:41 – Berlin (AFP) © 2023 AFP
