Berlin If the Ministry of Transport was occupied by a CSU politician, a large sum of tax money from the federal coffers often ended up in their Bavarian homeland. It doesn’t matter whether it’s railway lines, motorways or mobile phone masts: Neither Peter Ramsauer nor Alexander Dobrindt wanted to do without the appreciative praise and historical recognition in Bavaria.
And the last CSU Minister of Transport, Andreas Scheuer, also had a plan for setting up a monument at home. His monument was to be built in the state capital of Munich: the “German Center for Mobility of the Future”, or DZM for short. The project should cost the federal government almost 500 million euros in the first few years.
But Scheuer will obviously not be able to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors. The new Federal Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing from the FDP, and with him the budget politicians of the traffic light coalition, stopped Scheuer’s project before it could really get going.
The new coalition had already decided in the coalition agreement to review and realign the project. Now she has shrunk it down to the bare essentials.
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“Since no start-up office is required for the period of the concept revision, this was temporarily replaced by a contact point,” said the Federal Ministry of Transport when asked. There is not even a landline connection anymore. Only a c/o address at the German Weather Service in Munich has remained “so that we can continue to be contacted for the phase of revising the concept”.
DZM Founding Advisory Board no longer works
The founding advisory board has also ceased its work. The chairman was the former president of the Technical University of Munich, Wolfgang Herrmann. The members included none other than the President of the Association of the Automotive Industry, Hildegard Müller, or IG Metall boss Jörg Hofmann.
“Resuming activities or a new appointment to the advisory board can only be decided after the concept for the realignment of the DZM has been revised,” the ministry said. And Munich? “A final statement on the locations can only be given after the conceptual design has been completed.”
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It was to be a project of superlatives from which the city would benefit, the university, the automotive industry with BMW, Audi and many others. However, the first concept paper was only a meager one and a half pages. But that was not the point: Minister Scheuer was proud to announce the prestige project in the 2021 local election campaign.
The opposition raged. Not least because the then Research Minister Anja Karliczek had to face harsh criticism from the CDU shortly beforehand, after all, she had advertised a battery cell research factory for half a billion euros and finally awarded it to her home in Münsterland. The householders were alarmed, as was the Federal Audit Office anyway.
But Niederbayer Scheuer was undeterred. On the contrary: he convinced critics from the budget committee with the idea of ”satellite locations” – in the home of the powerful MPs: So some of the millions to be approved flowed in their home. The majority in the Bundestag stood.
In 2021, Scheuer quickly celebrated the apparent foundation in the federal election campaign with great fanfare and CSU boss and Prime Minister Markus Söder as well as Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD). However, it only consisted of an office on the university campus.
The election was lost, so Acting Federal Minister Scheuer tried to protect his project from the clutches of the new government. According to the ministry, the DZM should operate as a kind of “trust foundation” and thus be withdrawn from the access of future ministers. But nothing came of it.
The CSU reared up one last time in the recent budget negotiations. “In the case of groundbreaking projects, such as the German Center for Mobility of the Future, the traffic light switches to stubborn and squanders opportunities for innovation,” complained the CSU housekeeper Florian Oßner.
Mayor Reiter intervened at Wissing
Even SPD head of city Reiter, himself a member of the DZM advisory board, wrote to the minister again. According to unanimous professional opinion, Munich is predestined as the location for the headquarters of the DZM like no other in Germany. Wissing should implement the existing concept quickly. He can be sure of “full support”.
However, Reiter did not want to convince with a new concept. When asked, a spokesman explained that the city council had “spoken with a very large majority in favor of the realization of the DZM to the previous extent, with the concept developed so far and with Munich as the location of the headquarters”.
But Minister Wissing wants nothing to do with that. After all, there hasn’t been a concept worth mentioning so far, at best a vague sketch. A “private foundation” with “eight main topics” was to be created, as can be seen from the ministry’s documents, which are available to the Handelsblatt. A hopeless endeavor.
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Bernd Riexinger, spokesman for sustainable mobility of the left in the Bundestag, welcomes the quiet funeral: “We don’t need an Andi Scheuer memorial center in Munich.” The ex-minister himself admitted that the Munich location was “no coincidence”. , but based on the homeland. “The content of the concept was originally nothing more than doing contract research for the German car manufacturers,” Riexinger told the Handelsblatt. He demands from the new Minister Wissing “a comprehensive analysis of the deficits in mobility research”, which should then be discussed in the Bundestag.
Scheuer remains a small consolation: FDP Minister Wissing wants to set up the planned hydrogen innovation center for 290 million euros. It is said to have locations in Chemnitz, Duisburg, Pfeffenhausen, Bremen, Hamburg and Stade, according to a feasibility study by the ministry. However, whether 100 million euros will flow to Pfeffenhausen in Bavaria, as Scheuer had promised, is now decided by someone else.
For the DZM only money remains for commitments already made. According to Parliamentary State Secretary Daniela Kluckert (FDP), this is four million euros by 2024 for the “Mobility in Germany” project and a good half a million for the “German Mobility Panel” project. A total of ten million euros are still in the budget. All other tranches up to 2026: cancelled.
More: 9-euro ticket: 2.5 billion euros for an experiment with a clear outcome