Conflicting agendas mean Germany’s next government already looks hamstrung in areas like tax reform, where the SPD and Greens want to increase rates and the FDP wants to slash them. With its leader, Christian Lindner, installed at the finance ministry, the debt-averse FDP will have a de-facto veto over the two centre-left parties’ spending plans.
“What is certain is that there will be collisions of interest along the way.” “The three parties clearly agree that they want to see more progress but they are not necessarily pointing in the same direction,” said Wolfgang Merkel, a political scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
#Speed up game guardian nox free
While the Social Democratic party (SPD) of future chancellor Olaf Scholz has showcased its ideological flexibility by acting as junior partner to Merkel’s conservatives for three out of her four terms, the two smaller parties enter government with agendas that seem almost diametrically opposed: a Green party that vows to protect the environment from Germany’s dirty industry, and a Free Democratic party (FDP) that wants to liberate industry from burdensome regulation. Viewed from outside the country, the three parties that are likely to fill the government benches from the second week of December make an odd match, even by the centrist standards of German coalition politics. Zeh’s village saga, published in 2016 but recently turned into a television drama, could make for prophetic reading as Germany enters the post-Merkel era under a new government. “So what,” he comments wryly, “that’s the future.” Green policy made in Germany no longer just means protecting nesting wading birds, but unleashing business to build, build, build. His friend at the ministry has different ideas, however.
One of the characters, a birdwatcher called Gerhard Fliess, knows what to do: he calls an old friend at the local environment ministry to remind him that the countryside around Unterleuten is the habitat of an endangered species of sandpiper. In Unterleuten, a bestselling novel by the German novelist Juli Zeh, the inhabitants of a village outside Berlin are shocked to find out that a plot of land on their doorstep has been earmarked for a gigantic wind farm.
0 kommentar(er)
