After Hendrik Wüst, Winfried Kretschmann is now the second prime minister who perceives the federal government's "relief packages" as burden packages and, as far as the third package is concerned, threatens to reject it in the Bundesrat.
The rest of the heads of government should also be sweating.
Because what the federal government cannot bring itself to do, the states and municipalities are threatened: In view of the cost wave that is rolling towards them from Berlin, they will have to forego their own projects and announcements.
In the federal government, on the other hand, it has been clear since February 27, since the Chancellor's speech on the war in Ukraine, that we are indeed living in a "turn of the tide", but that everything will remain as it is for the traffic light coalition's favorite projects.
The coalition relieves itself with the relief packages.
Otherwise there is a 9 euro flop
The main stumbling block is the 9-euro ticket.
The countries lack the money for the expansion of local transport.
Now the expectations have risen again, but there is even less money available.
At the federal-state summit, which takes place at the end of September, Olaf Scholz will only stop the downturn in local transport if the federal government's commitments are finally kept.
Failure instead of expansion would otherwise mean a 9-euro waste.
The ticket is only representative of federal politicians who make themselves popular but let others foot the bill.
It is a policy that seeks the error in federalism that the central government messes up.
If the federal government concentrated entirely on the tasks for which it alone is responsible, that would be a political relief package worthy of the name.
The debt brake should be the lever for this.
If you can't make sense of it in normal times, you should actually learn it quickly in times of crisis.
However, the relief packages string together what is necessary and what is desirable, without any sense of priorities being recognizable.
The fact that the government is only now discovering the needs of the middle class shows very clearly how atrophied this sense is.