As soon as Chancellor Scholz has spoken a word of power on the nuclear power plant issue, FDP leader and Finance Minister Lindner is faced with new trouble. The Federal Court of Auditors criticizes the financing of the traffic light relief package. Lindner speaks about both in the ARD program Maischberger.
For FDP boss and finance minister Christian Lindner, the dispute over the extension of nuclear power plant runtimes is over. “I don’t want to experience the discussion we’ve had a second time,” said Lindner on the ARD talk show “Maischberger”. According to Lindner, Germany can now import liquid gas from the world markets very quickly and in large quantities.
At the same time, the FDP leader is demanding a massive acceleration of the planning process in Germany in order to be able to expand renewable energies quickly. In addition, all coal-fired power plants would have to be connected to the grid and the French nuclear power plants would have to be repaired quickly. “Then we won’t have to repeat the discussion we had this winter,” said Lindner.
The moderator wants to know how he stands by his statement that the nuclear power plants that are still connected to the grid should continue to run until the end of 2024. Lindner counters: “I understand the journalistic request that I now continue this dispute and torment the Greens with further demands. But I don’t want to accept the invitation.” Lindner leaves open whether this statement only applies to “now” or also in spring 2023. In any case, his basic conviction has not changed: if the FDP had been able to decide on its own, it would have ordered new fuel rods and kept them available in case they were needed. But it is a lamentable fact that the FDP failed to achieve an absolute majority in the last elections.”
Economics Minister Robert Habeck and he were not surprised by the content of Scholz’s word of power, says the minister. “If that had been the case, the coalition would have a trust problem.” Scholz made “a good decision on the matter,” emphasizes Lindner, referring to a study by the IFO Institute, according to which electricity prices could now fall by up to 10 percent.
This Thursday, the Bundestag will for the first time deal with the final phase-out of nuclear energy on April 15, 2023. Until then, all three nuclear power plants still connected to the grid should continue to operate, Chancellor Scholz decided on Monday.
In addition to the discussion about shutting down the nuclear power plants, the next problem is already waiting for the finance minister. The Federal Court of Auditors has criticized the financing of the €200 million relief package. It could be against the constitution. The package, with which, among other things, the electricity and gas price brakes are to be financed, is to be financed from a “special fund”, so to speak from a shadow budget. There are currently about thirty of these sub-budgets in total. Lindner has set out to reduce this number.
Shadow budgets are problematic because they can make the state’s true expenditure confusing. In this case, however, the problem is also that this special fund is to be used to finance an emergency that lies in the future. Funding is expected to run until spring 2024. The Federal Court of Auditors criticizes: Nobody can say with certainty whether the energy crisis will really last that long.
Lindner explains it this way at Maischberger: “We are now using our economic strength: we are borrowing money from the future in order to absorb these ruinous price peaks today.” Of course, these price peaks could also be absorbed from the budget, but the debt brake would have to be extended to do so. Lindner doesn’t want that, he says: “I would like to have the debt brake in the regular budget so that there is no bursting of the dam, so that everything possible is not financed and we never get back to solidity. That’s why I separate the crisis-related expenses from it.”
Lindner has a good chance that the Federal Constitutional Court will not deal with his budget management in the end, because someone would first have to call the court. Although the Union considers it questionable, it is questionable whether it really wants to sue the Constitutional Court and thus jeopardize the financial relief for citizens and companies through the austerity package.
