Minister, Austria is coming through the Covid crisis better economically than Germany.

With an increase of more than 4 percent, the gross domestic product in 2021 is likely to have grown by half more than in Germany, where it grew by 2.7 percent.

What do the Austrians do better?

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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Andreas Mihm

Business correspondent for Austria, Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey based in Vienna.

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We have tried to set the right course in the direction of ecologization and digitization during the crisis.

That seems to have worked fine.

The economic aid and the investment premiums that we paid out to companies during the crisis certainly helped.

And indeed, the economic data make us optimistic.

The experts forecast growth of 4.2 percent for the past year and 5.2 percent for the new year.

The eco-social tax reform that is currently being discussed in Parliament alone will bring us an additional 1 percentage point of growth.

Your house has provided more than 42 billion euros in funding.

This followed the approach of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP), who resigned at the beginning of October: "Cost what it may." Is that your motto too?

My motto is: Give what is necessary.

We have extended economic aid until March.

We support companies to get out of the crisis.

We will do what is necessary for this, and we will do it as precisely as possible.

There is already a debate about wrong and over-funding.

The aid must be granted quickly and unbureaucratically, but not naively and without controls.

Here and there, in individual cases, there may have been overfunding.

But we should leave the church in the village.

It is important that insolvencies were prevented.

Austria coped with the crisis to some extent, perhaps better than many other countries in Europe.

Now the OECD is also critical of the high government debt ratio of 82 percent, while the EU target is 60 percent.

Her party, the ÖVP, ran in the 2017 and 2019 elections with the aim of presenting a balanced budget.

When will it be?

That's hard to answer.

We are still in the middle of the pandemic.

But we want to achieve the goal again in the medium term.

We stand by the goals of the European Stability and Growth Pact.

And we will therefore fight hard at European level to ensure that budget planning and fiscal policy there become sustainable again in the medium term.

Aren't you at a loss there?

For me, some discussions at European level are going in the completely wrong direction.

Just talking about relaxing fiscal and budget rules...

... as the current President of the Council, French President Emmanuel Macron, is doing ...

... is the wrong way.

We must return to the strict rules of a sustainable budgetary policy.

After all, the crisis has shown that the countries that had developed fiscal policy leeway, such as Germany or Austria, are getting through the crisis better.

That's why we're looking for allies.

Of course we hope that Germany will be by our side here.

Isn't the new federal government in Berlin setting the course in a different direction?

Last but not least, your political friends from the CDU and CSU want to sue the Constitutional Court against borrowing from Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP).

The government program of the Berlin coalition contains a number of points that make me very optimistic.

There is talk of a good and stable budget policy.

There is a clear commitment to the European Stability and Growth Pact, the return to stable finances after the crisis.

That already suggests that we are pulling together.

When he was Finance Minister, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) associated the EU Next Generation aid package – positively – with the mutualisation of debt in the USA in the 18th century.

This was understood as if it approved of the same for Europe.

Is that the Austrian position?