If Annalena Baerbock (Greens) has her way, the simplest solution to the budget dispute is too close: the SPD, Greens and FDP MPs, with their chancellor majority, are once again suspending the debt brake. The Foreign Minister sees the ongoing war in Ukraine as a reason to once again declare an “extraordinary emergency situation”.
“What greater emergency could there be than this war in the middle of Europe? It would be fatal to have to say in a few years: We saved the debt brake, but lost Ukraine and the European peace order,” Baerbock told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. In May, CDU foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter had already called for a budget emergency to be declared. The suspension of the debt brake was justified because Ukraine urgently needed more support.
Anja Piel, a member of the Green Party and board member of the German Trade Union Confederation, also believes that there is “no way around” another suspension of the debt brake in order to save the budget. However, she is less concerned with security issues than with social policy issues. She is skeptical about further sanctions for people receiving citizen’s allowance in the hope of saving money.
Such debt brake initiatives are nothing new. After the Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling on the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) last November, politicians from the Greens and the SPD in particular saw the renewed suspension of the debt brake as a suitable means of not having to forego any spending.
The idea behind this is that if the money for Ukraine comes from a debt-financed emergency fund, more funds will be available in the actual federal budget for other projects – for example, for social issues, climate and development aid. But that will be difficult or even impossible.
This is precisely what Finance Minister Christian Lindner and his FDP are not the only ones who want to prevent politically. This is also contradicted by the fact that a suspension of the debt brake will not close a gap in the federal budget for 2025. The judges of the Constitutional Court made this clear in their ruling in the autumn. It would be possible to plug the expected holes in the 2024 budget with a new emergency resolution. There, too, billions are likely to be missing due to higher than expected expenditure, including for green energy subsidies, citizens’ allowances and defense.
A renewed suspension of the debt brake is likely to be prevented, above all, by the Basic Law. Well-known constitutional lawyers believe it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a legally sound justification for declaring a new state of emergency. This is shown by a WELT survey.
“As difficult as the situation in Ukraine is at present, this has nothing to do with an emergency that can be classified under the constitutional categories of budgetary emergency,” said Kyrill-Alexander Schwarz of the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. The military precariousness was foreseeable and is also due to the hesitant behavior of the federal government. The weakness of the military defense in Germany is also not an unforeseen event that was beyond the control of the state.
Article 115 of the Basic Law is crucial. It states that the debt brake’s borrowing limits could be exceeded “in the event of natural disasters or exceptional emergency situations that are beyond the control of the state and significantly affect the state’s financial situation.”
Hanno Kube, a constitutional lawyer at the University of Heidelberg, also draws limits for politics from this. “Emergency loans may only be taken out if the need for funds has a shocking effect on the budget situation,” said the man who was one of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group’s legal representatives in the successful lawsuit in Karlsruhe last year.
The emergency loan will then serve to cushion the shock. The war in Ukraine does have significant consequences for the federal budget, Kube continued. “However, these needs have been recognized for a long time and can be included in budget planning,” said the lawyer.
Alexander Thiele, Professor at the Business
Such a justification is “not trivial, especially since the requirements increase the further back in time the actual trigger occurred,” he said. Why this is still a sudden and unexpected external event more than two years after Russia’s attack on Ukraine must be explained “very specifically”; it is not enough to simply refer to “the war.”
From Thiele’s point of view, the narrow interpretation of the debt brake by the Constitutional Court leaves little room for maneuver outside of independent special funds such as the one for the Bundeswehr. Since an independent special fund must be anchored directly in the Basic Law, the traffic light government would also need a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag and Bundesrat for this – just as it would for a fundamental reform of the debt brake. Neither of these is in sight in this legislative period.
