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Lars Klingbeil this Saturday at the closed meeting of the SPD executive board

Photo: Jörg Carstensen/dpa

The CDU is already worried about the name: it doesn't care about citizens' money and actually wants to change everything about it.

SPD leader Lars Klingbeil has now rejected such demands: “The amount of citizens’ money is determined by a constitutional court decision.

This has now been implemented, with the consent of the Union, by the way.

It is also right for the state to provide people in need with insurance.

"We have to have other debates than attacks on the welfare state," he said.

The CDU and CSU accused Klingbeil of playing off economic stability and social security against each other.

The Union's answers for a strong business location include lower pensions and a higher retirement age.

For the SPD, however, social security and economic strength belonged together.

The CDU wants to overhaul the citizen's money support system.

"The name 'citizen's money' is misleading and is an expression of the political concept of an unconditional basic income," says a draft resolution for a meeting of the Federal Executive Board on Monday.

"We clearly reject this concept." The CDU wants to rename the citizen's money "New Basic Security" and "abolish it in its current form."

Debt rules reform

After a reform by the traffic light coalition at the beginning of 2023, citizens' benefit replaced the Hartz IV (unemployment benefit II) system.

It is intended to secure a living for people who can work but whose income is not enough to live on.

Those affected should be helped to gain a foothold in the labor market with advice, training and further education.

However, criticism of the reform was often mixed - including by Union politicians - with criticism of the simultaneous twelve percent increase.

However, this had nothing to do with that, but was actually based on a calculation formula that, in principle, also applied before.

(You can read more about these changes here.) 

The SPD federal executive committee approved a paper entitled “A strong economy for all” at a meeting in Berlin on Saturday.

In it, the SPD accuses the Union of wanting to use the economic challenges to make a comeback of its policies from the 1990s, for example with lower corporate taxes and fewer social benefits.

That is the wrong way.

In the paper, the SPD confirms, among other things, that it is striving for a reform of the debt rules.

“We reject rigid limits on borrowing by the federal and state governments; they prevent investments and impair the state’s ability to act,” it says with regard to the debt brake.

mamk/dpa