FDP leader Lindner's summer interview +++ Baerbock criticises SPD plans for Syria and Afghanistan
Monday 29th July
Good morning.
Today’s post includes a breakdown of yesterday’s ARD ‘summer interview’ with FDP leader Christian Lindner. He faced tough questions over the new Budget, especially on allocations of funding for defence.
First, here are the headlines across the major German papers:
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (liberal-conservative)
** Comment, Christoph Erhardt (Beirut): “What Israel would be threatened with”
Calls for Israeli restraint, and advocates Arab rapprochement: “The best defense against Iran and its shadow armies would be a security alliance with Arab powers anyway. Another Lebanon war would not serve this goal.”
“Lindner: welfare must be reformed”: reflects on Lindner’s comments in ARD interview (see below)
Süddeutsche Zeitung (left-liberal)
Die Welt (conservative)
“Israels faces war on two fronts”/ comment, Clemens Wergin: “All lines have been crossed”.
Quite a different tone to FAZ’s Beirut correspondent. Suggests Israel has ‘shown restraint’ towards Hezbollah so far since last October, but the deaths of several children in a rocket strike on the Golan Heights means that Israel “must react if it does not want to appear weak in the eyes of its mortal enemies. Because not reacting to such an escalation would only mean inviting further and even more serious attacks by the Iranian puppets”.
SPD tells Baerbock to ‘take a holiday’ after she suggested that the deportations plan would fall foul of international law. Government seems close to major announcement on this: watch this space.
Handelsblatt (liberal, business-focused)
**“Shipping costs quadrupled: Merchants see ‘piracy’”
Fascinating insight into debilitating costs German merchants are facing due to instability through Red Sea, Suez. One firm, ‘Depot’, has gone into administration citing these costs. Shippers such as Hapag-Lloyd accused of ‘piracy’, using retailers who rely on their services as their ‘plaything’.
Lindner in the hot seat
FDP leader Christian Lindner was interviewed by ARD’s Matthias Deiß yesterday.
Defence
Straight off the bat, Deiß questioned Lindner on the position of defence and security in the allocation of funds in the ‘federal budget’ for 2025.
Why is the Defence Ministry led by Boris Pistorius (SPD) getting 5 billion euros less than it requested? Has the goal of getting a budget agreed come at the cost of national security? Is this government kicking the can down the road on defence?
Lindner defended his record on defence, saying that he has done “more for the armed forces than any of his predecessors in the last 25 years” (which is probably true, but not necessarily to his credit). He said that he had allocated resources to “any project which Pistorius could demonstrate in conversations with the Chancellor and myself to be technically necessary”.
When presented with Pistorius comments that the budget “annoyed” him, Lindner pointed to the €100bn ‘special fund’ (announced in Scholz’s ‘Zeitenwende’ speech in February 2022), and that effectively he would have to make the most of it. “Financial stability”, he said, “has to go along with national security”.
He also added that Russia’s war on Ukraine is not an ‘emergency’ , but a ‘new reality’ to which the country’s leaders would have to ‘react structurally’. This was Lindner implicitly ruling out the use of the clause in the constitution on ‘emergency spending’ to exempt defence spending increases from restrictions on public borrowing.
Debt Brake, welfare ‘reform’
Deiß then moved on to questions about the ‘debt brake’ regime itself. Lindner has requested for the new budget to be subject to a judicial review to ensure that it conforms to borrowing rules.
There is supposedly still a €17bn ‘hole’ in the government’s plans, which this review will no doubt find, thereby strengthening Lindner’s authority to make further changes in areas such as welfare (which Linder signalled here to be in his crosshairs).
Lindner said that the issue was “not that the government has too little money, but that is has too many outgoings”, and so would not ‘take the easy way out’ by invoking emergency spending rules and increasing taxes and borrowing. The FDP are the only thing stopping the Greens and the SPD from raising taxes, which he said would happen ‘immediately’ if not for them.
Interestingly, he said that he would not allow Germany to become like France, where “high taxes and borrowing are threatening financial stability”.
FDP-AfD pact in Thuringia
Lindner was questioned on the upcoming state and local elections in the East, including Thuringia, where an FDP Minister-President was elected by the state parliament with the help of the AfD.
As a result, the national party has withdrawn support for the state party, but is still supporting local candidates. Lindner gave a roundabout and complex explanation as to why this was appropriate, which boiled down to “a state parliament with a liberal voice is much better than one without”.