This Thursday, nine o'clock, Hubertus Heil once again achieved an important goal, perhaps the most important for him in this election period.

The Bundestag debated its law on the new citizens' allowance for eighty minutes, then the members of parliament voted.

The majority of the traffic light coalition is considered safe;

The Minister of Labor hopes to get the countries that have to agree in the Bundesrat around with compromise offers.

Ralph Bollman

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of business and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Once again, salvation is close to the goal.

Since he became minister quite surprisingly five years ago, he has heaved one bill after another over the parliamentary hurdles, whether it was the basic pension in the old electoral term, most recently the increase in the minimum wage or now the new citizens' income.

Not even counting smaller projects such as the right to return part-time, nor the constant crisis management due to the corona virus or Putin's war, including gigantic short-time work programs.

They grumble to employers about constantly new and expensive proposals that do not take into account the burdens of the crisis.

To this day, they resent the fact that Heil didn't even appear at the annual conference of their association in late summer.

Some even want their predecessor Andrea Nahles back, who is now at the head of the employment agency.

Everyone is looking at Lindner and Habeck

Despite the criticism, it all went pretty quietly in the end.

Ever since the attack on Ukraine turned into a crisis in the energy supply and state finances in this country, the whole world has been watching the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck and the FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner, all the more so since the two have often been at odds recently.

Nobody talks about salvation.

This is rather favorable for him and his projects.

Last Thursday he was sitting in a meeting room in his ministry on Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse, a rather frightening building from the National Socialist era.

He turns fifty that day, actually he wanted to treat himself to a week's autumn vacation.

But there were coalition negotiations in Lower Saxony, and citizen income is more important to him than a milestone birthday, especially now that the opposition has gotten stuck on it.

"For the labor market, citizen's income is the biggest reform of the last 20 years," he says.

"We rely on training instead of temporary jobs to get people out of unemployment permanently." It sounds like he's pretty much at peace with himself.

Business associations are up in arms

However, it is by no means the case that everything is going off without conflict.

Business associations regularly storm against Heil's plans, such as the legal right to permanent home office, and his own coalition partners often enough feel overwhelmed by him.

It's not like he got through everything either.

But he uses his small and larger provocations quite skilfully in order to have room for compromises afterwards and to give the others the feeling that they had prevented worse things from happening.