“The citizens are fed up with this standstill, and I am too,” Scholz said in a speech to the Bundestag lower house of parliament during a session on the 2024 budget, sporting a black eye patch following a jogging accident.
The chancellor announced a new “Germany pact” with a bundle of measures aimed at reducing bureaucracy, speeding up approval processes for new construction, and digitising citizens’ access to key government services.
The pact sets out a range of goals to be achieved in consultation with powerful regional governments including swifter online consultation processes for wind farms and transport and data networks, a government document showed.
“Citizens want orientation, courageous compromises,” Scholz said. “That is my demand of us all: the government parties that have argued too loudly in recent months and also the democratic opposition.”
This was also key, he said, to fend off “those who want to draw political profit from decline scenarios and panic-mongering” in reference to the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has surged in polls over the past year to second place, well ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD).
This “so-called alternative” was in reality a “demolition commando” for our country, he said in unusually harsh terms.
The chancellor rejected the idea of fresh stimulus to boost an economy battling high inflation, financing costs, and a drop in exports.
“I set no store by a debt-financed flash-in-the-pan so-called stimulus programme that would counteract the European Central Bank’s attempts to fight inflation,” he said.
The government was already investing record sums, he said. The 2024 budget foresaw it investing €58 billion from its climate fund in hydrogen, the chip industry, climate-friendly mobility, digital infrastructure, and building renovation.
It was also investing €54 billion from the regular budget in railways, new bridges, faster internet, charging stations, social housing, and a climate-neutral economy. Rail operator Deutsche Bahn alone was getting €24 billion extra in investment over the coming four years.
Such sums showed Germany was holding its own vis-a-vis the US and the US$430 billion US Inflation Reduction Act, he said.