Finance Minister Lindner has had a legal review carried out to determine whether and how the 17 billion gap in the 2025 budget can be closed. But external auditors are apparently expressing doubts. The negotiations could therefore start all over again.
The measures with which the federal government wants to close a 17 billion hole in the coming budget have been examined for weeks by external experts on behalf of Finance Minister Christian Lindner. Now these external auditors are said to have concerns about whether everything can work out.
“Against the background of the debt brake, the advisory board expresses considerable doubts about all measures considered by the federal government in this context,” says a letter from the scientific advisory board at the Federal Ministry of Finance, which was made available to Handelsblatt. This could jeopardize the federal government's budget plan.
Doubts in advance
It was examined whether funds that were actually intended for the gas and electricity price cap could be used to close the budget gap. It was also examined whether only loans could be granted to Deutsche Bahn and Autobahn GmbH instead of subsidies.
Constitutional lawyer Hanno Kube had already told the ARD Capital Studio warned against repurposing funds for the gas and electricity price cap. “If KfW has funds that were financed through emergency loans, these funds must definitely not be repurposed for other purposes.”
This is exactly what the Federal Constitutional Court did at the end of 2023, says Kube. Last year, the Karlsruhe ruling classified repurposed Corona loans as unconstitutional and threw the traffic light government's budget plans into disarray. The Federal Constitutional Court's ruling on the budget is considered one of the biggest defeats of the traffic light government.
Loans to Autobahn GmbH and the railway?
There has also been a lot of criticism for days about the other measures, namely granting Deutsche Bahn and Autobahn GmbH a loan instead of subsidies. This budgetary trick is supposed to work like this: if the state takes out loans and then lends them out, this should not be subject to the debt brake. This would give the federal government more leeway for other expenditure.
For Deutsche Bahn and Autobahn GmbH, this means that in the future the necessary money will not simply be transferred to them as a grant, but will only be lent in the form of a loan. This loan would then have to be repaid by the state-owned companies at some point. But that seems complicated.
As soon as this preliminary idea was communicated by the Federal Government, the Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Autobahn GmbH, Volker Geyer, promptly complained to the ARD Capital Studio“Under the current legal situation, Autobahn GmbH cannot take out a loan, has no income, and cannot pay back any interest that becomes due as a result,” said Geyer. All of this would place a disproportionate burden on Autobahn GmbH, and therefore this whole scenario is pure eyewash.
Exchange with Scholz and Habeck necessary?
Until yesterday, the Federal Ministry of Finance did not want to comment on the audits. The Ministry of Finance is to send the Bundestag the draft budget for 2025 by August 16. Nothing has changed in this plan, a spokesman for the ministry said yesterday. But how things will now proceed and how the 17 billion hole in the next budget can now be plugged is something that Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Finance Minister Lindner and Economics Minister Robert Habeck will certainly have to talk about soon.
“If the three gentlemen need to talk to each other, they can do so at any time, and of course they are in constant contact,” said government spokesman Wolfgang Büchner when asked whether they would do so during the summer break. In order to prevent the next budget dispute, they will now have to exchange views – even if the Chancellor is currently on vacation.
