These funds will be taken from "part" of the new debts contracted under the 2021 budget to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, but having "not been used", announced Friday Christian Lindner, who this week donned the costume of Minister of Finances.

To deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the German Parliament had authorized Angela Merkel's government to borrow 240.2 billion euros, a record in a country used to budgetary sobriety.

But Berlin will ultimately not need the whole envelope, intended to finance the support systems for companies and short-time working, even if the country is currently facing a strong resurgence of the epidemic.

This is why the government of Social Democratic Chancellor (SPD) Olaf Scholz wants to use the remaining funds to invest heavily in the digitization of the economy and the ecological transition.

The coalition between SPD, ecologists and liberals, has set itself the ambitious objective of producing 80% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

The money will in particular go to top up an "energy climate fund", dedicated to the energy transition, in which the previous government had already invested 28 billion euros last year.

A corrective finance project will be presented to the Council of Ministers on Monday, said Christian Lindner at a press conference.

-Debt brake-

This budgetary sleight of hand will make it possible to reconcile two demands of the new German government: investments for the future, carried by the Social Democrats and environmentalists, and budgetary seriousness, defended by the liberals of the FDP, and its leader, Christian Lindner .

The first steps of this follower of budgetary orthodoxy in the Ministry of Finance, a strategic position, are particularly scrutinized when this question was one of the points of friction in the negotiations to form the coalition.

The objective of this operation is to inflate the envelope of new spending as much as possible, in order to invest massively, before the return to budgetary discipline that the coalition is planning from 2023.

The use of these lines of credit, authorized and already budgeted for by the previous government, does not constitute "additional debt", insisted the minister on Friday, qualifying this plan as "a boost for the national economy".

The "debt brake", enshrined in German constitutional law, requires the government not to borrow the equivalent of more than 0.35% of GDP each year.

The health crisis shattered this rule, and Berlin had, exceptionally, to put it on hold for the fiscal years 2020, 2021 and 2022, in order to support its economy, hit by anti-Covid restrictions.

But the use of these emergency credit lines for longer-term investments drew criticism from the opposition, with many voices questioning the constitutionality of such a move.

"The constitution of these reserves, financed by the loan, raises questions from a budgetary point of view. And it is necessary to see if it will resist a legal control", warned the deputy CDU Christian Haase, member of the committee budget in the Bundestag.

Within the Ministry of Finance, it is retorted that the former government "has already carried out" the same maneuver, as part of the recovery plan of 130 billion euros launched in June 2020, after the first wave of coronavirus, largely funded by Covid debt.

Government partners have pledged to be "creative" to find the necessary resources, but the path is narrow: they have pledged not to raise taxes.

Different economists have estimated at around 50 billion euros per year the amount of future spending necessary for the transformation of the country.

© 2021 AFP