Retirement provision ǀ The yellow man for social affairs – Friday

by time news

The fact that Johannes Vogel’s political life began with the Greens fits in with the current political situation. The FDP member of the Bundestag with the three-day beard and the quick language first got involved in the eco-party in North Rhine-Westphalia in the 1990s before he became a member of the Young Liberals in 1998. In the meantime, still not 40 and deputy party chairman, he is considered by the FDP to be an experienced politician who thinks strategically and works hard. He is perceived as the man for the social. This makes him a central mediator vis-à-vis the Greens and Social Democrats in the ongoing coalition negotiations.

Vogel, born in 1982, is one of those young politicians who together turned the FDP upside down after 2013. Who massaged different structures, a modernized self-image and new strength into a completely broken, quarreling and outdated party machine. This experience of how the old is stripped off and the new developed and applied is exactly what the SPD, Greens and FDP are now looking for. And need.

If you catch Johannes Vogel on the phone these days, you can feel a lot of energy despite the great hurry. Yes, he sometimes sleeps restlessly, thinking about politics and work. “But I like structuring times.” For his party, he heads the coalition working group IX, “Welfare State, Basic Security, Pension”. It’s about what affects people in their everyday life: a piece of security, trust in a personal future that is halfway okay. Even before the coalition talks began, Vogel’s FDP set stakes here. In the exploratory paper there is the wording that one will “enter into a partial capital coverage of the statutory pension insurance in order to stabilize the pension level and the pension contribution rate over the long term”. In future, this should “invest its reserves on the capital market in a regulated manner”.

Translated from the theoretical exploratory language into the more practical coalition language, this means the introduction of the share pension. Johannes Vogel has touted them again and again during the past election campaign. The FDP came up with the idea from Sweden, where the state has successfully speculated with contributions for decades. There, however, the entire pension system is structured differently. In Germany, two percent of the almost 19 percent pension contributions are to be cut in the future and invested in the international capital market. Citizens as market participants. Vogel’s credo: In view of the aging of the population, we have to “think in terms of decades instead of legislative periods”. However, the plan assumes that the economy will continue to grow forever. This is likely to meet with skepticism, especially among the Greens. But now the share pension stands as an FDP victory point in the exploratory paper.

Johannes Vogel fits the traffic light like no other

It is exactly what his party leader Lindner wanted Johannes Vogel to do in the team. The 39-year-old has a captivating way of communicating his ideas, and at the same time he is known as a compassionate social politician. Not a common feature of the FDP. He really enjoys the new type of traffic light conversation – confidentiality, respect – he says. Vogel is convinced that this is the only way to go. “We knew we had to reverse the trend”. Cell phone alarms, piercing are no longer part of it. In addition, the party system has changed. “We now have four medium-sized parties. In other words, majorities now have to be found differently than before. ”Sentences like this show that Vogel continues to think along with the Union parties. Progress, he says, arises “from the middle”.

In North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017, he showed how flexible and power-conscious his FDP can be. As Secretary General of the regional association, he led the election campaign for the Düsseldorf State Chancellery. In the end, the SPD Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft was actually voted out of office, since then Vogel’s FDP has governed tightly, but constructively and trustingly with the CDU. Together with Christian Lindner – with whom, by the way, he attended the same high school in Wermelskirchen – he led the coalition negotiations and supported the formation of the government.

With the relaunch of the liberals in the extra-parliamentary opposition between 2013 and 2017, his FDP demonstrated how a run-down party can regain the trust of the electorate. What made the project successful back then? “Start with why”, answers Johannes Vogel. Every change process must begin with the question of why. “We were ignored at that time and therefore had time to talk: Why does there have to be a liberal party at all, what makes us unique?” The answer was the connection between social and economic freedom. “Our conclusion was: We postulate what voters can rely on. Contents decide. “If you listen to this sentence, Lindner’s quote from 2017 comes to mind, when the FDP disrupted the Jamaica coalition:” It is better not to govern than to govern wrongly. “

Four years later, the FDP quickly decided to hold talks with the SPD and the Greens. And together with the Greens it forms a strategic center of power. It is not a love marriage. But no compulsion either. What is the answer to the question of why? It could be “reason”.

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment