Countdown for the “traffic light” in St. Nicholas week: After the SPD and the FDP, the Greens will vote for the new coalition agreement, which will be available for signature on Tuesday, perhaps with the greatest pain in the back, lower back and stomach. Before that – at 10 a.m. – Olaf Scholz, the social democratic diamond, will reveal which seven ministers are his party. The following apply: Svenja Schulze (construction), Christine Lambrecht (interior), Wolfgang Schmidt (Chancellery), Hubertus Heil (work). For the rest of the departments to be allocated (defense, health, development) at least two, better three women would have to be named. Ex-party leader Andrea Nahles is not there, she should head the Federal Employment Agency.
Karl Lauterbach, uncrowned talk show king (see “Anne Will” yesterday), again is probably not there either. A top place in the new Corona Expert Council of the Scholz government is reserved for him. “Then there was talk, you don’t know how: That’s what an academy is called,” wrote the poet king Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Well, the progress government still has to solve a few homework to progress. For example, how the important future topic of digitization will be administered. The title that FDP strategist Volker Wissing will use sounds pithy: “Minister for Transport and Digital”. According to its plans, the SPD-led Chancellery will hand over the area to Dorothee Bär, previously run as a digital canon, as will the Green Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate, its Department VI (“Digital and Innovation Policy”). Its head, Stefan Schnorr, would simply switch to his old companion Wissing in the rank of State Secretary.
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And finally, in the FDP-Wünsch-Dir-Was catalog, from the SPD-led interior ministry, the topics of e-government, IT security and digital society can be found. That Robert Habeck, who tried to get his feather headdress, defends against Wissing’s attacks, can only be clarified in a conversation among chiefs.
(Photo: AP)
If we are already with personal details, Let’s take a look at the Munich Security Conference, where the long-time director Wolfgang Ischinger, 75, is now declaring his retirement in the Handelsblatt after 13 years. The long-time Merkel advisor Christoph Heusgen, 66, will take over. In detail he says about …
- a Russian invasion of Ukraine: “Moscow knows that the price would be much higher than the income. But it is good to remind Russia of what NATO has done these days. “
- Annalena Baerbock’s China policy: “When Olaf Scholz reads out the demands on Taiwan and Hong Kong from the coalition agreement at his first meeting with Xi Jinping, he will say: Thank you very much, but I see it very differently. In my opinion, the coalition agreement is not a declaration of war on Beijing, and Scholz cannot and will not seek a break with China. “
- the right America policy: “Europe must also be able to show Trump voters in Idaho that we are an important partner for the USA.”
With such lofty goals it is worth remembering what Bill Clinton once said of the United States: “A president is like a cemetery administrator. He has a lot of people under him, but nobody listens. ”
While French President Emmanuel Macron in Saudi Arabia was talking to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was badly reputed as a “Khashoggi murderer”, about commissions, a veritable rival candidate for the election in the spring grew up in his home country. Surprisingly, Valérie Pécresse, 54, won the primary elections for the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party.
“I can beat Emmanuel Macron,” believes the president of the capital region Île-de-France, who beat the southern French right winger Éric Ciotti with 60.95 percent. She already hands out with verve against the “zigzag president Macron”, who wants to please, “instead of acting”. His debt policy is “irresponsible”, he has “burned the reserves”, fears the first applicant for the Élysée Palace from the former Gaullist party. The promise of “Madame Non”: to repair France again.
Volkswagen is contributing interesting news for this personal wake-up service. The male-dominated and testosterone-driven car company is scrapping the well-deserved board member Hiltrud Werner, 55, after five years, but at least keeps her department of integrity and justice, contrary to previous considerations. This is where the eight-year-old legal scholar Manfred Döss, who has a stone in the board of the owner families Porsche and Piëch, turns up.
As chief legal officer, he contained the diesel scandal and was then allowed to act as the legal director of Porsche SE in Stuttgart, where the families pool their VW shares. Before VW, Döss fought hard with MG Technologies and RWE as a “man for the rough”. A list of the most influential German lawyers said: “Whatever there can be in the life of a corporate counsel, Manfred Döss has experienced it.”
Economy is the art of numbers, not voodoo, which is why we asked the Energy Economics Institute at the University of Cologne (EWI) to calculate how much electricity the country needs in view of the strong “traffic light” plans. In 2030, 80 percent of electricity should come from renewable energies and 15 million e-cars will purr on Germany’s streets.
The EWI comes to the conclusion that some gas-fired power plants with a total installed capacity of 23 gigawatts (GW) should be built by 2030, which would correspond to an output of 23 nuclear power plants. It is ten times what has been planned so far. The photovoltaic capacities alone would have to increase from the current 54 GW to 200 GW. As Kerstin Andreae, head of the BDEW energy association, puts it so nicely: “It must be clear to everyone: The renewables targets of the coalition agreement are extremely ambitious.”
Disrupted supply chains, high raw material prices and rising inflation rates are unsettling consumers and investors. What can investors do now? What do the high consumer prices mean for investments? I’ll talk about that tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. on Investment Live with NTV stock exchange moderator Katja Dofel, with Ulrich Stephan, the chief investment strategist at Deutsche Bank, and with the economist Peter Bofinger. Would you like to be there? Welcome! Then please register or submit questions.
And then there’s Elon Musk, Jack of all trades of disruption, who works with all means, apparently also with the communication tool of intentionally leaked e-mails. So he is now warning of a possible bankruptcy of his space company SpaceX. Behind this is that Musk does not want to be satisfied with transporting satellites and astronauts with a Falcon 9 to closer destinations in space at SpaceX. You dream of Mars and you need a much larger and completely reusable rocket for this.
The only unfortunate thing is that the development of the Raptor engine stalled in the planned “Starship”. The production crisis is unfortunately “much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” says Musk’s mail: “We are in serious danger of going bankrupt if we don’t start a Starship at least every two weeks next year.”
Given a company valuation of more than 100 billion US dollars, it should be more of a letter of motivation for the employees than a real alarm message. Former Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer commented: “We all live under the same sky. But we don’t all have the same horizon. “
I wish you a heavenly start to the week.
I warmly greet you
you
Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor
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