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Germany 2025 Budget Unlikely Before Election: Minister
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Germany’s government is unlikely to pass a 2025 budget before a snap election expected on February 23, newly appointed Finance Minister Joerg Kukies said Tuesday.
“It is not realistic that the new federal budget for 2025 will be passed” before the general election, Kukies said at an event hosted by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.
Germany’s two main parties said earlier Tuesday they had agreed on the date for new elections, following last week’s implosion of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition.
Spending questions were central to the tensions between Scholz and former finance minister Christian Lindner, who was fired by the chancellor last Wednesday.
The rupture led Lindner’s liberal FDP party to pull out of the government, leaving Scholz without a majority to pass legislation.
Kukies, who was appointed to replace Lindner, played down the risks of failing to pass a budget for the coming year.
“It is not the end of the world,” he said, while acknowledging that the lack of a fiscal plan was “not desirable”.
Germany would issue a provisional budget for 2025, meaning the government could “make all the necessary expenditures and will fulfil all the commitments it has entered into,” Kukies said.
The provisional budget however meant that “new projects can only be implemented with a delay, he said.
This is not the first time Germany has had to issue such a temporary spending plan.
Europe’s biggest economy started this year with a provisional budget after the government’s finances were upturned by a constitutional court decision in late 2023.
For 2024, Kukies dispelled concerns that political gridlock could hold up the resolution of issues relating to the current year’s budget and cause a potential spending freeze for the rest of 2024.
“As things stand today, the German economy does not have to fear a standstill in the budget,” Kukies said.
The leader of the conservative opposition CDU Friedrich Merz indicated earlier Tuesday that a supplementary budget could move forward.
“We can do that this week,” Merz told reporters after confirming the agreement on the date of snap elections.
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