Due to ruling of the Constitutional Court: German government postpones decision on the 2024 budget

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The budget leaders of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the liberal FDP jointly announced on Wednesday that the budget will not be put to the vote in the Bundestag next week. “Our goal is to advise the budget quickly but with the necessary care to create planning certainty,” said Rolf Mützenich (SPD), Britta Hasselmann and Katharina Dröge (Greens) and Christian Dürr (FDP).

They did not provide any information on whether a budget resolution would be off the table this year. A regular Bundestag session will take place before the end of the year. If the deadline were shortened in the Federal Council, a decision would theoretically still be possible, but according to the ‘traffic light coalition’ this is unlikely.

The background for the postponement is last Wednesday’s budget decision. The Constitutional Court had annulled the reallocation of 60 billion euros in the 2021 budget. The money was approved as a Corona loan, but was then intended to be used for climate protection and the modernization of the economy.

Now it is no longer available. At the same time, the judges also decided that the state could not reserve emergency loans for later years. Instead, a state of emergency must be declared every year.

According to experts, this not only has an impact on the planned investments from the climate and transformation fund, but also on the special fund for the so-called energy price brakes. This year, 37 billion euros have already been paid out from this pot, which were not actually available.

If there is no budget at the beginning of the year, only expenses necessary to keep the administration and meet legal obligations are possible. In practice, however, the Ministry of Finance can authorize ministries to use a certain percentage of the resources from the not yet approved draft budget each month.

“As parliamentary group leaders of the traffic light factions, we believe that it is necessary to carefully take this judgment into account when drawing up the budget for 2024,” the SPD, the Greens and the FDP said. Budget week is therefore canceled and other topics are instead put on the agenda for next week’s Bundestag session.

(SDA)

Source: Blick