All the pains of the Scholz government
The political and economic recovery in Germany after the holidays and the general picture of the problems that the Scholz government will have to face. The article by Pierluigi Mennitti from Berlin
The German government returned to business by quickly launching some reforms it had been working on for some time: the one to simplify the possibilities for transgender, intersex and non-binary people to change their name and gender in official documents, known as the gender self-determination, the one on the partial legalization of cannabis and the one to speed up the procedures for obtaining German citizenship (citizenship law). The latter has among the objectives of counteracting the decline in the birth rate and of compensating the problem of manpower shortage by making it more attractive for workers to choose Germany as a new home.
In addition, the SPD has put on the table the proposal to freeze rents for three years, with the only exception of a 6% three-year increase in cities where there is greater demand. The law currently in force allows for maximum rent increases of 20% in a three-year period, reduced to 15% in areas with the greatest housing problems, while the majority agreements envisage reducing the maximum three-year increase to 11%. An expensive but popular proposition in a country like Germany where nearly 60% of Germany's 41 million households live in rented accommodation.
In short, the government seems to have put the turbo back on, although all these laws will now have to be examined by the Bundestag, where the oppositions promise battle, being controversial proposals. But for Scholz it was important to give a signal of a strong restart after a summer full of internal controversies and some stoppages imposed on government allies. Especially to the Greens, to whom the chancellor blames (although without saying it explicitly) the dramatic drop in the executive's approval of the rigid climate policy and the lack of attention to the concerns of citizens and businesses regarding the costs of the energy transition.
The laws on gender self-determination and the partial legalization of cannabis will be able to raise the morale of the coalition's most left-wing electorate, but it is on economic and energy issues that the Scholz executive is called to give convincing answers next autumn. Starting from the launch of the law on heating, the one that accelerates the replacement of gas and oil boilers with those with a lower climate impact (above all heat pumps), stalled due to the internal conflicts of the majority and due to an intervention not on the merits but in parliamentary practice of the Constitutional Court. Discussions resumed in the Bundestag in September, with public opinion frightened by the prospects of the costs of such an operation and by the opacity of the measures, with regard to timing and state contributions. And in the government the contrasts between liberals and Greens are not allayed: the latest in chronological order was the veto placed (later removed) by Family Minister Lisa Paus on an economic stimulus package proposed by her Finance colleague Christian Lindner, a project lighthouse of the liberals.
The chancellor himself will try to remedy this and the many other disagreements within the coalition, who from today is gathering his ministers in the traditional closed-door seminar in the castle of Meseberg, the government residence on the outskirts of Berlin.
The meeting takes place in the by now consolidated climate of economic depression, with the country which has been wondering for months about the quality of the German crisis: temporary, cyclical or structural?
The polls for the executive are now catastrophic. The latest in chronological order, produced by the Insa Institute for Bild, reveals that 64% of Germans believe that a change of government would benefit the country, while as many as 70% are dissatisfied with the chancellor's work. For Hermann Binkert, director of Insa, "there are all the signs of a decline of the stationery".
Scholz's slump in voter approval is also reflected in the consensus for his party, the SPD, now steadily overtaken by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Afd) in second place, while the first is occupied by the Cdu, the party by Friedrich Merz, in any case far from the thresholds of 35% which were on average recorded in the years of Angela Merkel.
The drop in government parties (all of them, in particular the Greens), is even more significant if we consider that, excluding the AfD, none of the oppositions seems to benefit in a particular way. So much so that the debate on the quality of its new leader and on his real ability to represent the party in the next federal elections has also opened in the CDU. And in the already mentioned Insa poll, the derelict Scholz is always ahead in terms of popularity with respect to both Merz and the leader of the Bavarian CSU Markus Söder.
For the time being, in the midst of a crisis of confidence that is now also spreading to large sectors of the business world, the governing parties will have to face two very delicate regional elections in the autumn. In mid-October we vote in Bavaria and Hesse, two Länder pillars of the West, where the mood of the productive sectors is grim. In Wiesbaden (the capital of Hesse, while the economic center of gravity of the region is naturally Frankfurt), the Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, the author of the reform on citizenship, who in recent days had to defend her reads from the criticisms of a former Social Democrat president, Sigmar Gabriel. But in the polls the candidate of the CDU is chasing, who with 29% has a reassuring advantage of 9 points. Here bowls seem relatively stable compared to 5 years ago, with slight increases for Cdu and Afd (date at 15%) and slight decreases for Spd and Verdi. It will therefore most likely be the CDU that will lead the game, choosing to confirm the outgoing alliance with the Greens or to create a "small" grand coalition with the Social Democrats.
In Bavaria, the eternal CSU will confirm the first place, even if the 38% assigned by the polls is far from the golden age in which the Bavarian Christian Socialists gathered the absolute majority and also below the 40% threshold. frontier that divides a success from a defeat. The civic list of the Freie Wähler, estimated at 12%, could allow for the renewal of the current government, and its presence, in some ways, contains a rapid rise of Afd. And yet it is interesting to observe what happens at a safe distance from the CSU, where Verdi and Afd vie for second place with estimates of 15 and 13% respectively. Even in Bavaria, where, with the exception of the capital Munich, the social democratic presence is reduced to a minimum (10%), the decline of the Greens is visible: over 2 percentage points less than 5 years ago and over 10 compared to the previous elections in 2013.
Thus the only consolation for the historic parties is that the autumn vote is confined to two Länder in the West. Just a starter of the earthquake in favor of Afd that could take place next year, when the voters of three eastern Länder, Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, will go to the regional polls, where the far right is the first party with percentages above 30%. But until then Scholz and his majority hope they have corrected course.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/tutti-i-dolori-del-governo-scholz/ on Tue, 29 Aug 2023 07:14:14 +0000.