Germany, here is the new CDU-CSU program on taxes, energy, transport and more
There is a lot of Armin Laschet in the new economic program of CDU-CSU. All the details in the article by Pierluigi Mennitti
It is a challenge to the crisis and perhaps also to the spirit of the time, a time in which the state embodied in Germany by the Grosse Koalition of which the Union itself is the main party has reoccupied the stage, in the name of the battle against the pandemic and its consequences. . The electoral program of the Union (CDU and CSU), presented on the day of the summer solstice, a mixture of past and future, tries to keep its feet firmly planted on the ground by relying on the stability of 16 years of Merkel governments and throwing one's heart beyond the obstacle, promising a decade of innovation and digitization that somehow recognizes – without showing self-criticism – the impasse on the issue in the Merkel era.
The challenge is to engage the productive world, the entrepreneurs, in the economic recovery after the pandemic, which cannot rely only on the financial commitment of the State: to be sustainable it must give back to private individuals the desire and means to invest and grow.
Hence the central promise: no tax increases in the next five years, indeed a commitment to easing the tax burden for businesses and the middle class. The liberal accents are back, the common program of the CDU and the CSU puts at least the two declinations of the historic German model of the social market economy on the same level. The post-Merkel would like to become a new chapter, not a flight forward compared to three decades and more marked by a political stability that in times of crisis it is good to claim, rather a side step in search of lost modernization.
In this balance between past and future there is the risk of remaining in the middle of the ford, leaving the Greens the ownership of every innovative suggestion and perhaps the liberals the monopoly of the animal spirits of the company. There is not the great effect in the program that Laschet and Söder presented together, but a measured mixture of certainties and bets in the hope that it will be the right recipe to convince the voters on September 26th.
No tax increases and reliefs for medium-low incomes, therefore. The opponents are already asking for an account of how they will be financed, the Union thinks that these measures will encourage citizens and businesses to spend and invest and that the resources will come from growth. A gamble, given the large flow of public money due to the pandemic, but no more risky than that of the Greens, which intend to finance the expensive pro-climate measures with more taxes and the usual (difficult) fight against tax evasion.
A season of reform is now what the Union is proposing, dropping the obvious criticism of why they are proposing it right now as it has been governing for 16 years. Digitization, de-bureaucracy and a new formula to guarantee retirement for young people, the study of a so-called "generation pension". To catch up with the delay accumulated in new technologies, to strengthen the alliance with the partners of the democratic West to show (especially to China) that democracies are able to compete in the future with autocracies.
Of course, there is also the ecological transition, the challenge on the zero-emission industry that the Union sets for 2045, but which it wants to be socially sustainable. The indirect accusation against the Greens is that they do not take into account that the weaker sections of society are unable to afford the costs of an acceleration and that the industry must be involved as a partner not faced as a counterpart. Especially since the majority of companies have already incorporated the concept of sustainability into their development programs, knowing full well how it has become a market advantage.
In this sense, measures such as a ban on diesel engines or the introduction of a general speed limit on all motorways are rejected. Go ahead instead for a program to expand and strengthen the railways.
Then there is a chapter dedicated to internal security, an issue to which a part of the conservative electorate to which the Union remains faithful is sensitive, which also provides for the intensification of video surveillance systems in public places, an issue that could provoke friction with the two potential allies, Greens and Liberals.
There is much of the new CDU leader Armin Laschet in this program. Both in the method of preparatory work, to which the two twin parties worked with equal dignity, and in the content, marked by a great balance. New accents should not be underestimated, especially in economics, in which we can see the hand of Friedrich Merz and the liberal wing of the party. Laschet did what he promised the day after the victorious congress, he gave space to all the components of the party, then looking for a synthesis between continuity and change, between reliability and innovation: on the one hand, the value of stability linked to Merkel's legacy on the other, the need to offer the electorate something new.
The risk of equilibrium is to appear washed out. And some criticism in this sense has already arrived from those environments that the new program would like to bring together. A first comment by the Handelsblatt, the main German business newspaper, argues that it reflects the "Laschet blur": a program created "not to scare citizens exhausted by the pandemic, not very concrete in many points, lacking a real accent of rupture ".
In the end, however, the personality of the candidates and their ability to connect with the mood of the voters will matter more than the party programs. Which, three months after the vote, appears very changeable. Once the novelty effect of Annalena Baerbock has been exhausted, the latest polls reward Laschet's political experience: the Union is not only back in the lead, but is leading the Greens by eight percentage points, 28 to 20. The other parties are chasing. And one of the reasons for the recent reshuffling must probably be identified precisely in the tax issue.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/programma-cdu-csu-ripresa-economia-germania/ on Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:18:39 +0000.