Social policy: It's a good thing that people's income is being disputed

In the end there will be a consensus.

Exactly what that looks like is an open question, but it can be ruled out that the traffic light will completely bury its plans to introduce citizen income because the Union is completely blocking it in the Bundesrat and the mediation committee.

The rifts are not deep enough for that.

On the issues that are particularly controversial between the CDU/CSU and traffic lights, i.e. the amount of protective assets, the duration of the waiting period, and the sanctions, there will be agreement somewhere in the middle.

How it is in functioning democracies.

Nevertheless, the current dispute over what the SPD likes to call the biggest welfare state reform in twenty years is anything but superfluous.

Rather, it was high time that such a dispute took place again.

Above all, however, that it is being fought between the parties of the center, between the SPD and the Greens on the one hand, the CDU and CSU on the other and an FDP, which is part of the federal government, but in the question of how much the state does to you has to give help to people without work and how much he can demand of him in terms of performance and sacrifice, traditionally does not stand on the side of red-green.

A question of the image of man

The conflict has permeated the political debate in Germany for decades.

It's about much more than labor market or social policy, it's about the image of man, based on Kennedy's famous saying, whether the country has to do more for the citizen or the citizen for his country.

Forty years ago, after 13 years as Social Democratic chancellor, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl initiated his “spiritual and moral change” with the remark that performance must be worthwhile again.

The fact that federal labor minister Hubertus Heil, a social democrat, now used this principle for his citizens’ income law when it was passed in the Bundestag against the will of the Union shows that the topic has lost none of its topicality, but that the political camp remains controversial has the better concept for balancing the interests of citizens and the state to some extent.

It can be assumed that ultimately the two mainstream parties, the CDU and SPD, have an interest in allowing as many people as possible to live and work under dignified conditions.

Nevertheless, this is the core of the dispute: one side fears that people will let themselves be kept from work by too generous a social policy, the other side assumes that they are so willing to work that they only reach for state aid in extreme emergencies.

Debate remained suppressed for a long time

The decisive point of attack for the Union was that the legal plan of the traffic light takes away the incentive for people to go to work because the catalog of benefits of the citizen's income is so attractive and the refusal has so few consequences.

The proposal by the CDU opposition leader Friedrich Merz did not quite fit in with this, but only to increase the standard rates for basic security and to postpone the rest of the planned citizen's benefit until later.

Because then measures to get a professional qualification more quickly would have been put on the back burner for the time being.

But when Merz suggested this, he must have been clear that the traffic light would not agree to such a reduction in its most important social and labor market policy project.

Soon after the Red-Greens introduced the Hartz reforms earlier in the century, the dominant model of government was the grand coalition.

Many disputes, including those over social and labor market policies, were smoothed out in the machine room of the Coalition and SPD coalitions before they saw the light of day in parliamentary public.

Contradiction came only from the fringes.

This has stifled the all-important public debate on such crucial issues.

The criticism from the Left Party, and later from the AfD, could be dismissed as expected and pointless.

It's good that things are different now.

The fact that there is a broad agreement on such a major socio-political issue is just as important as a previous dispute between the parties of the political center.

So more people should be able to gather behind the result of the citizen money dispute, if it is over.

More than an exciting footnote is that the FDP has to fight on the side of red-green.

The fact that the additional income opportunities are expanded in the traffic light plans for citizens' income is primarily due to her.

It could be a new form of grand coalition that still leaves enough room for opposition in the center.