“Petrified” is a beautiful word because it’s so ambiguous. Perhaps that is why the Federal Court of Auditors likes to use it so much in its current report on state finances. On the one hand, the financial experts want to make it clear that 90 percent of the federal budget is firmly planned, as if “set in stone”. This is already restricting the Federal Government’s ability to act. On the other hand, the nice word “petrified” alludes to the state of paralysis that can affect a critical observer of debt.
In any case, the Federal Court of Auditors warns that the state finances will be overburdened in view of the sharp increase in expenditure, most recently due to Corona and the Ukraine war. “The financial leeway to be able to cushion unforeseen events has noticeably reduced,” says the report. In the coming decades, “demography-related expenditure would increase significantly and thus pose a growing challenge to the sustainability of public finances”.
The diagnosis: progressive petrification. The therapy: compliance with the debt rule.
This brings us to Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP), the treasurer and debt planner, but also the lord of the holes. The prognosis of the Federal Audit Office keeps him in the game as a “big player”, as a fixed, not always popular size in the calculations of the other two matadors, Olaf Scholz and Robert Habeck.
That a daily power struggle involuntarily develops between Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, SPD technocrats and green Homme de Lettres, my colleagues Julian Olk, Klaus Stratmann and Martin Greive have described – under the impression of their recent trip to Canada. In places like Toronto or Stephenville, Scholz fulfilled the duty of the agenda without shining, our reporters describe.
How else should it be when the top communication muffle has to read a gag like “windy welcome” or an exclamation like “What a skyline” from the paper, while his Minister of Economic Affairs cultivates the art of the political “Inspector Columbo” appearance: hesitantly , doubtful, purposeful. Scholz confidants, we learn, have long considered Habeck to be a much greater threat in the 2025 chancellor duel than the black rock of the opposition, CDU leader Friedrich Merz.
Robert Habeck (left) and Olaf Scholz: would-be chancellor against chancellor.
Opposition leader Merz wants to use a frontal attack to stop the much-discussed, little-loved gas levy, which allows gas suppliers to add a good 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour to customer bills. The CDU/CSU are planning a motion in the Bundestag in September to overturn the corresponding ordinance. The gas surcharge was “poorly done in terms of craftsmanship, and the citizens also secure the profits of some energy companies with their surcharge,” said parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn of the magazine “Spiegel”: “This is redistribution from the bottom up.”
Although the frondeurs are missing a number of MPs for the required parliamentary majority, they are at least fueling the internal group dynamics of tension in the traffic light coalition. SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert asked Habeck’s Ministry of Economics to legally rule out that economically healthy companies could benefit from the gas surcharge. It’s also somehow absurd that oligopolies that have grown too big still receive a political bonus.
Our cover story provides insights into the current emotional world of many German industrial leaders. They suffer and worry because of the dramatically increasing prices for electricity and gas. “German industry is currently paying a market price for natural gas that is eight times higher than the market price in the USA,” says Christof Bauer. The energy expert from the TU Darmstadt made his calculations based on the wholesale prices for 2023, with a gas price of 270 euros per megawatt hour.
Matthias Zachert, CEO of the specialty chemicals group Lanxess, is already warning that “several companies in key German industries are closing”. However, all the state money that is also being demanded for this crisis cannot prevent the USA from becoming a net exporter of energy thanks to its fracking activities – and from the industry there benefiting.
Many are currently experiencing that lively personal appraisal interviews contribute more to the entrepreneurial spirit than the dreariness of empty office buildings. And that the much-vaunted effects of “remote work” end where creativity begins. It is all the more crucial that Hubertus Heil (SPD) and his Federal Ministry of Labor are planning a fundamental return to the obligation to offer home offices.
A draft bill provides for employers to be obliged again from October to April 2023 to offer their employees home working to protect them from corona infections, i.e. working between the ironing board and the kitchen board. According to the draft, the number of infections is expected to increase again.
The hygiene concept and the protective measures include a “reduction in operational personal contact, for example by reducing the simultaneous use of rooms and by offering employees the opportunity to work from home”. Employees who continue to work in the company (“presence work”) should be able to benefit from vaccinations during working hours, two corona tests per week and medical face masks.
Reports of attacks on journalists are known from countries such as Russia, Iran, China, Lebanon and Mexico. In the meantime, however, such reports are also part of everyday life in Germany. For example, a reporter from Bayerischer Rundfunk was attacked by a man with his fists on the sidelines of a press conference on a campaign for corona vaccination in Munich. The attacker had previously denounced journalists present as “traitors of the people” and “vaccination terrorists”.
Only last Saturday, Thomas Weigelt, non-party mayor of Bad Lobenstein, suddenly physically attacked and injured a journalist from the “Ostthüringer Zeitung” during a market festival.
“Whoever hits a journalist, hits democracy. And a democratic society must not tolerate such totalitarian attacks on the part of its elected representatives for a second.”, warns Philipp Welte, spokesman for the board of directors of the media association of the free press. “Every attack on journalists is also an attack on press freedom,” says BR director Katja Wildermuth. Here, clout should prevent headlines.
And then there’s the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, which cast their shadows. It’s been a while – 15 years – since a German film, the Stasi drama “The Lives of Others”, was successful in Hollywood. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has not gotten over the success to this day.
Now the film “Nothing New in the West” – a remake of the film adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque – is in the running for the Oscars 2023. This was announced by German Films, the agency for German film abroad. A jury selected director Edward Berger’s strip, which will be shown on Netflix in October, from a total of nine applications. Almost 100 years ago, Remarque wrote a work with the anti-war book “which is unfortunately more relevant today than we expected,” said Berger.
Hollywood mogul Carl Laemmle Jr. and Hollywood studio Universal received two Oscars for their 1930 production. In Germany, however, Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP used the defamation of the honor of German soldiers in the First World War, which is allegedly offered in the book and film, for one of their anti-Semitic and anti-liberal campaigns.
Let’s just end with Remarque (1898-1970) himself: “Life is a ship with so many sails that it could capsize at any moment.”
I wish you a successful day on which you will certainly stay the course.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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