GERMANY: Budget & more – 16th May 2024

Hallo from BA! This is the Rorshok Germany Update from the 16th of May twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Germany.

Let’s start this week off with a well-known conflict within the government coalition: the government’s budget. Last week, on Tuesday the 7th, the ministries made their official demands. This started a debate within the government, since the demands were far above what Christian Lindner, the minister of finance, of the liberal Free Democratic Party, or FDP, had set as an upper limit. In total the demands of all the ministries exceeded the fiscal plans of Lindner by 24.6 Billion Euros. This Tuesday, the 14th, somewhat surprisingly, Chancellor Scholz backed Lindner and defended his fiscal plans. This is a surprise because last week it looked like Scholz would stand behind his party colleagues. The majority of the budget demands that exceeded Lindner’s plans came from ministries run by the Social Democratic Party, or SPD, which Scholz is a part of. It’s not quite clear why Scholz decided to take Lindner’s side over his party colleagues. However, it might be that Scholz, like Lindner, is a staunch defender of the debt brake, which allows only a percentage of GDP to be spent in loans.

In the wake of the fiscal debate, the leadership of the FDP presented its plans for a change in state budget policies. It demands less social welfare, shrinking the state deficit via less state spending, and strengthening the economy. In order to force through their plans the liberals are now blocking the enactment of the already agreed-upon pension reform that the government announced two weeks ago. This reform contains a central FDP goal, the stock pension: A scheme in which the state invests in stocks to finance the pension fund. But the FDP is blocking the reform now, to try and force the hand of its coalition partners to accept their demands for the new budget policies.

Moving on, in an interview on Monday the 14th chancellor Scholz voiced his support for a minimum wage of 15 Euros per hour. The most recent increase put the minimum wage at 12.8 Euros per hour. Germany’s minimum wage is not set politically, instead, a committee consisting of representatives of workers and employers and one neutral vote sets the minimum wage. The EU law commands that by twenty twenty-five the minimum salary in Germany must be at least 14 Euros per hour, but politicians from the Greens, the SPD, and The Left, plus representatives of Verdi, one of Germany’s biggest unions, said that to make a living at least 15 Euros an hour would be needed. Lindner came out against this and pointed out that the minimum wage is not set by parties.

On to another topic, the right extremist Alternative for Germany party, or AFD, has lost big in court. Already in twenty twenty-one, the Constitutional Protection Agency, the national security agency, had classified the AFD as possible right extremists which allowed them to use surveillance measures on the party. The AFD then protested that classification in court, but in March twenty twenty-two the court in Cologne agreed with the Constitutional Protection Agency, which then led the AFD to go into revision with the next highest court. This court in Münster has now come to a decision and again agreed with the agency. Statements from the head of the agency throughout last year led many to suspect that once the court reached a decision the agency might even elevate the status of the AFD to definitely right-extremist, which would give them even more powers of surveillance and other means to protect democracy from the AFD.

Staying with the AFD, the parliament lifted the immunity of one of their MPs so that police could search his properties. AFD MP Bystron has been long suspected of corruption and money laundering. The search seems to have been quite large as on Wednesday police searched properties in Berlin, Munich, and Mallorca. The searches come just weeks after the media reported on Bystron receiving monetary gifts from Moscow and were apparently kickstarted after a Czech security agency obtained a recording of Bystron receiving 20.000 Euros from a pro-Russian Ukrainian businessman in Prague.

In other news, MPs have given themselves a pay raise. Every year the parliament’s diets are adjusted to the average wage development in the country. This year has seen significant salary increases across all industries which amounted to an average pay rise of six percent. The parliamentarians now got the same pay increase of six percent and earn around 11,200 Euros a month.

Baerbock, the foreign minister, is currently on a trip through the Pacific. She went to Fidji on Saturday the 11th to visit the island that has been heavily affected by climate change. While in the past she expressed that Germany needed to start participating in geopolitics, she now clarified that climate politics are geopolitics.

More on foreign politics, on Monday the 14th chancellor Scholz participated in a meeting of the Nordic council, consisting of the heads of the governments of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland. The meeting was all about weapon deliveries to Ukraine, and both the German chancellor and the Danish prime minister appealed to their colleagues to increase their support for Ukraine. The main topic of discussion was Sweden’s willingness to deliver some of its many Anti-Air Patriot Missile Systems, but the country probably won’t do it. When asked if he thought Germany was doing enough for Ukraine, Scholz said that most European nations weren’t doing enough.

Next up, a new study published on Monday the 13th examined the equality in education access across all German states. The country doesn’t have a centralized school system, every state has its own unique academic system. The main differences are the time spent in elementary school, varying between four and six years, and the organization of high schools.

Some states have a system that divides pupils after elementary school into three different types of schools according to their grades —best grades, best schools. Other states have communal high schools where students learn together regardless of their grades. In both high schools, the final diploma is the Abitur, which allows students to apply for university.

The new study confirmed that the system of the early separation of students makes low-income students have fewer chances of getting a good education. Children from lower classes have disadvantages because, for instance, they might have not been read at home. These disadvantages might lead to worse grades, so they won't be able to attend the best schools, and even though they might perform well, it’s their parents who choose the children’s schools, and they tend to “correct downwards" as they themselves didn't have a good education.

The State of Bavaria is the strictest in terms of separation, which results in the state that offers the least equal chances.

On a different note, do you recall that there was a demonstration on the 27th of April calling for a caliphate in Germany? Well, the same group that organized that demonstration staged one in the city of Hamburg. Participants, instead of holding banners and posters calling for a caliphate, now held posters just saying “censored.”

From ideological fire to actual fire, an explosion rocketed the neighborhood of Flingern in the city of Düsseldorf. A Kiosk in the ground floor of an apartment building exploded on the night of Wednesday the 15th. Three people died and many more were heavily injured. The firefighters found a body with severe injuries that couldn’t have been produced by the fire in the rubble, so the police are assuming the explosion might have been a means to destroy evidence of another crime.

And to wrap up this edition, the northern lights were visible all across Germany on Saturday the 11th because of an unusual strong solar storm that also caused some disturbances to telecommunication. It also caused a storm of red, green, and purple colored pictures on social media.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Ciao!