2023. December 13 – 11:16
On Tuesday night, the German government coalition parties agreed on the draft 2024 budget, according to government sources. Mirror. An official press conference on this matter will be held at noon on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Federal Government Chancellery, after which negotiations will continue between the factions of the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party and the liberal Free Democratic Party.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz will issue a government statement at 1pm primarily about the European Council meeting, but she is also expected to talk about the results of the coalition negotiations that took place that night. Accordingly, a solution was reached to finance the €17 billion budget gap, which, according to the German Constitutional Court, could no longer be filled by borrowing.
As we wrote in detail previously, the Constitutional Court did not allow the government to borrow more than 0.35% of German GDP due to the debt brake introduced into the German Basic Law in 2009.
Although the Scholz family would have largely financed Germany’s €60 billion climate protection fund with this – due to the Constitutional Court’s decision, the fate of many investments made with government support has been in doubt for weeks.
Germany’s three coalition parties negotiated for weeks over the mid-November ruling: while the Social Democrats and Greens called for a suspension of the debt brake, the fiscally disciplined Free Democratic Party flatly rejected it. The stalemate has been closely watched across Europe, and even the leaders of the EU institutions have warned Berlin to reach a decision on the matter as soon as possible – you can read more about it here.
FDP Chairman and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, Green Party Deputy Chancellor and Minister of Economy and Climate Protection Robert Habeck, and Social Democratic Party Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a Bundestag meeting on November 28, 2023 – Photograph: Lisi Niesner/Reuters
a According to information from Spiegel However, Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economy and Climate Protection Robert Habeck wrote at 5:15 am on Wednesday in the chat group of the Green Party parliamentary group: “We have now concluded the negotiations.” He added: The government is still in place, and the result is good, but “more patience is needed so that we can announce the details.”
According to Spiegel, all three parties could accept the new budget along with several other measures, and the Social Democratic Party faction believes that the German parliament, the Bundestag, could vote on the budget along with the supplementary budget for 2023 at the beginning of January.
