Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder has announced that he will file a lawsuit against the state financial equalization in the first half of the year. “It’s just unfair and unjust,” said the CSU chairman of “Bild am Sonntag”.
Five donor countries had paid the eleven financially weaker federal states 18.5 billion euros last year. Bavaria contributed more than half of this with payments of 9.9 billion euros. A pain limit has been reached: “We show solidarity, but not naively,” said Söder. “We don’t want to abolish the state financial equalization, but reform it and relieve the Bavarian taxpayers.”
The Bavarian FDP leader Martin Hagen said that the state government celebrated the reform of the state financial equalization in 2016 as a great success. Söder was in charge of the negotiations as finance minister at the time. The lawsuit announced was “embarrassing and simply a transparent election campaign maneuver”.
The Bavarian Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU) replied that Bavaria “received 3.4 billion euros in the early years but has now paid in over 108 billion euros”. Despite the reorganization of federal-state financial relations, there is again a growing imbalance. “Solidarity and personal responsibility must be reconciled.”
In 2013, Bavaria and Hesse had already filed a lawsuit against the state financial equalization system at the time, but withdrew their lawsuit in 2017 after the financial relations between the federal and state governments were reorganized. The system is now called financial power equalization. It serves the goal enshrined in the Basic Law of creating equal living conditions in Germany.
