AIn the morning everything had seemed peaceful. Before the meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) at the Prime Ministers’ Conference (MPK), several heads of government of the federal states had expressed their confidence that an agreement would be reached with the federal government on the distribution of the financial burdens resulting from the Ukraine war.
The confidence lasted until 12:03 p.m. Wednesday. Then an e-mail came from the chancellery to the prime ministers, who were about to go into their last vote before meeting Scholz. The prime ministers did not like the fact that the content entitled “Key points for the implementation of gas and electricity relief measures – final” had already been sent to the media at this point. But that was the minor problem compared to the content of the letter from the government headquarters. Unagreed, the key issues paper deviated by a few billion euros from what the federal and state governments had laid down in the resolution proposal for their meeting when it came to “hardship case regulations”. It should be more expensive for the countries.
How angry their prime ministers were was shown at the press conference given by Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil – a party friend of the Chancellor and currently the chairman of the MPK – and North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) before the meeting with Scholz. They spoke of “irritations” that had arisen as a result of the changes made by the federal government on the subject of hardship regulations. It was said from state circles that all prime ministers had opposed the plan of the chancellery. Weil was on the phone with Olaf Scholz.
The draft resolution for the MPK stated that the federal government would provide twelve billion euros for hardship cases, which should be used to help in cases where the electricity and gas price brakes were not sufficient. This should be financed from the Federal Economic Stabilization Fund. The world then looked different in the key issues paper. The federal states should pay half of the hardship funds for small and medium-sized companies. The federal government suddenly no longer wanted to support hardship cases for the university clinics. Likewise, the federal government only wanted to support its own social institutions if they became a hardship case. And no longer those of the countries.
In the three-hour negotiations with Scholz, the federal states were at least able to achieve partial success. It is true that the federal government only wants to pay one billion euros for small and medium-sized companies, even with the social institutions, which are becoming hardship cases, it is concentrating on its own. But at least the university clinics that find themselves in hardships are back under the umbrella of the federal government. Overall, the tones on Wednesday evening were also forgiving on the state side.