The billion-dollar Corona special fund of the state of Hesse is unconstitutional.

That was decided by the Hessian State Court in Wiesbaden.

The budgetary authority had been exceeded, the court justified its decision on Wednesday.

There would have been other forms of crisis management.

The law on special assets is incompatible with the state constitution.

The state's loan-financed special fund has a total volume of twelve billion euros.

The purpose of the special fund is to mitigate the consequences of the corona crisis.

The loans can be taken out until the end of 2023, for example to offset tax losses for the state and municipalities.

Members of the state parliament groups of the SPD and FDP had submitted a norm review application to the State Court of Justice in November 2020 against the corresponding law "Secure Hesse's good future", the AfD parliamentary group in March of this year.

The reason for the step was that the law violated budgetary constitutional principles, the state parliament's budget law and the prohibition of new borrowing.

So it is unconstitutional.

Repayment begins in the coming year

The Hessian state parliament had decided on the financing model in the summer of last year with the votes of the government factions of the CDU and the Greens. Before it was passed in parliament in Wiesbaden, there had been very tough debates for weeks. The opposition vehemently rejects the special fund and has been speaking of a shadow budget ever since. Instead, there is still a demand to rely on supplementary budgets to cope with the corona costs.

Finance Minister Michael Boddenberg (CDU) last spoke of a return to economic stability in Hesse when presenting the draft budget for the coming year.

As a result, the expenses from the Corona special fund were significantly lower for the next two years.

Instead of the possible twelve billion euros, the country will therefore possibly only need just under nine billion euros.

So far, according to the Ministry of Finance, 296 concrete aid for more than 5.9 billion euros has been initiated from the loan-financed special fund.

Hessen is already starting to repay the funds in the current year.