Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck has expressed his dissatisfaction with the current state of the traffic light coalition and is hoping for more unity before a coalition committee. “We have an order to do something for the people, for Germany and at the moment we are not doing enough enough,” said the Green politician on Tuesday evening in the ARD “Tagesthemen”. He hopes “that we can untie a lot of knots this week and overcome a lot of blockages. And then get a really good performance record again. But that’s certainly not the case at the moment.”
In recent weeks there have been numerous discussions between the SPD, Greens and FDP, from the expansion of the motorway to a ban on new oil and gas heating systems to the upcoming budget for 2024. A coalition committee is scheduled for Sunday.
“The cooperation in the cabinet is impeccable,” said Habeck. “We can talk about things calmly and almost normally, but we just can’t get them across the political finish line because then we keep checking how the media echo chamber is, what’s going on at my next party conference, where are the next state elections.” Now the governing coalition must “focus on ourselves again and make it clear to us again what a privilege it is to be in this government, to make it clear that climate protection is also a task for society as a whole”.
At the same time, Habeck criticized the fact that a bill on replacing the heating system had been pushed through to the press at an early stage. “We have early coordination in the government, which means that only a few people get the bills so that you look at them and say: Listen, we still need to talk about that, you can’t put that in the departmental vote.” Nothing had ever been pierced there. “Here, the draft law to the “Bild” newspaper – and I must therefore assume – was deliberately leaked in order to damage trust in the government.” In this respect, talks between the coalition partners were “probably destroyed on purpose, because of the cheap tactical advantage”. Since something like that doesn’t happen by accident, he was “a bit alarmed whether there was any willingness to agree at all”. That damaged the project and the debate.
