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WIs that the application speech for the position of Minister of Economy? When Annalena Baerbock delivered her keynote address Friday night at the Greens party virtual conference, it only took a few minutes before she started talking about the economy. Holding on to the market economy, yes, but it should become more social and ecological.
What the co-chair of the Greens did not say, but what happened in her half-hour speech: This market economy should also be guided much more by politics than before. “Not because the state can do better business, but because the economy needs clear conditions,” Baerbock said. As is often the case with this topic, he referred to the steel industry, which should be producing in a climate-neutral way in the future, thanks to government subsidies and strict guidelines for the automotive industry, for example, on the extent to which you have to use “green steel”, even if it is more expensive.
Squinting at the treasure
When Robert Habeck took the stage at Berlin’s Tempodrom on Saturday lunchtime to give his keynote address, he was concentrating on the growing division of society in Crown times. But Baerbock’s colleague also insisted on taking a position on economic policy: Germany persisted in a financial policy “in which debts are more feared on the books than debts in reality,” he criticized.
Habeck and Baerbock during the party congress
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Image: EPA
This was followed by a call for more public investment in schools, swimming pools and sports centers, buses and trains, financed by higher taxes. Interest and capital gains are still taxed lower than labor, companies like Amazon and Facebook avoid German tax authorities. The Greens, according to Habeck, would change that.
It is part of the current party leadership creed, “We focus on the material,” which does not speak openly about which ministries it would like to occupy if it participated in the next federal government. But behind the scenes, the corresponding mind games have been running for a long time.
This includes the fact that the party now considers the Foreign Ministry, for which it was in talks during the Jamaica negotiations, is no longer so desirable. Too representative, too little room for maneuver, you can hear. The Finance Ministry, on the other hand, seems to green strategists to be the ideal turning point for implementing the € 500 billion investment program planned by the party for the next ten years.
Robert Habeck on Saturday during his speech, Annalena Baerbock sits in the living room and listens.
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Image: dpa
Two years ago, in a conversation with the “taz”, Baerbock reflected on the need to expand the Ministry of the Environment to a super ministry, separate the responsibility for energy from the Federal Ministry of the Economy and add it to the Ministry of the Environment. Little can be heard of this at the party now. The motto is simply not to create contradictions between economy and energy.
Instead, it is now being discussed whether the environment and agriculture should not be grouped into one ministry, even if the Greens are aware that the Union would hardly leave them such a ministry. Farmers are an important group of voters in the Union, even the policy of the Federal Minister of Agriculture, Julia Klöckner (CDU) – regulation of fertilizers by keyword – is too green for many.
