The July draft budget agreement, reached after an all-night negotiation between Scholz, a Social Democrat (SPD), Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens, and Linder of the fiscally conservative Free Democrats (FDP), was met with relief in Berlin given the intractable differences between the coalition parties on matters of spending.
The deal was also seen as a must given the German coalition’s dismal performance in the European election, in which Scholz’s SPD recorded its worst result in a national vote in more than a century, while support for the Greens fell by nearly half. Given the coalition’s weakness, the survival of the government is largely dependent on whether it can reach a final budget agreement without a major clash.
Lindner’s announcement may now be leading to just such a clash.
Experts commissioned by the finance ministry concluded in assessments, news of which was leaked to the German newspaper Handelsblatt late last week, that the coalition’s draft budget deal is at risk of being annulled by the country’s courts, in large part because it plans to use €4.9 billion euros from Germany’s national development bank originally allotted to offset the cost of high gas prices for other purposes. Those assessments, Linder subsequently said, mean that German leaders will need to go back to the table to renegotiate the budget deal.
But politicians in the other two parties in Germany’s coalition — the left-wing Greens and SPD — were outraged that Lindner went to the media to discuss the assessment rather than handle the matter internally, accusing him of throwing his coalition partners under the bus in order to burnish his own political credentials as a fiscal hawk.
“You can only see that as self-promotion,” Kevin Kühnert, the SPD’s secretary general, told German public television. In a separate television interview, Kühnert accused Lindner and the FDP of wanting “to kick off renewed discussion about the welfare state in Germany.”
