The government and the opposition paint a contradictory picture in the budget debate.
The CDU/CSU parliamentary group can rightly complain about the lack of solidity of the first traffic light budget.
It is not conclusive why she is filing a lawsuit in Karlsruhe against the violation of the debt brake (in the second supplementary budget for 2021), but even wanting to ennoble the subsequent circumvention of the debt brake (in the “Bundeswehr special fund”) with an amendment to the Basic Law.
The result will be budgets that can no longer reflect the core of state action, national defence, in the federal budget, which has been degraded to a "core budget".
This is state policy bungling.
Friedrich Merz put his finger in the wound in the general debate.
But even he could not seek the way out in refusal.
Or should the special fund fail in the end because of his faction?
Instead, he formulated face-saving conditions intended to prevent Olaf Scholz from being as comfortable with the Bundeswehr as with compulsory vaccination.
As if nothing had happened
There is a suspicion that the Basic Law is only being changed because the coalition lacks unity when it comes to the Bundeswehr and the “turning point”.
Scholz made no secret of the fact that he could only buy the discipline of the government factions by leaving their wish lists untouched.
In parts, the budget debate seemed like a ghost debate, as Merz correctly criticized, as if nothing had happened.
The speech by SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich showed that the doubts of the Union parliamentary group are justified.
Ukraine or not, he interpreted the "turn of the tide" in a return to the policy of detente.
Neither the two percent target that Merz insisted on, nor an upgrade of the Bundeswehr fit into this stubbornly defended worldview.
How the special fund and a sustainable perspective for the Bundeswehr are to come about is likely to be a tough test for Olaf Scholz's art of government.