The FDP has delayed the parliamentary procedure for the heating law. The Union still brings the issue to the Bundestag. The allegations between the government and the opposition are as fierce as the rifts between the FDP and the Greens are deep.
When three quarrel, the Union is happy: That must be the modified proverb for the current legislative period. As with other conflict issues, it is once again the CDU and CSU who are dragging onto the big stage of the Bundestag what the SPD, Greens and FDP are unable to agree on quietly. This Wednesday it’s the heating law again. According to the wishes of the SPD and the Greens, this should be read for the first time in the Bundestag tomorrow, Thursday. But the Liberals stopped the start of the parliamentary procedure on Tuesday, which is why the mood in the traffic light has reached a new low. More than ever, the coalition members have to listen to questions about an impending break in the government alliance that once started so hopefully.
Because the first reading of the cabinet’s draft amendment to the Building Energy Act (GEG) has been postponed indefinitely, the Union is putting the issue on the agenda on its own initiative. As part of a current hour demanded by the largest opposition party, Jens Spahn is the first speaker to put his finger in the open wound: “You maximize frustration and anger through the way you treat each other,” the deputy chairman of the Union faction calls out to the governing parties . “Nobody cares about people’s existential fears in real, real life.” Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck can only listen quietly on the government bench at the moment.
Left: “Bumped up” draft law
Spahn attests that the traffic light is “on the way to becoming incapable of governing” after citing the crudest sayings that the Greens and Liberals have used in the past few days at the beginning of his speaking time. Spahn denounces that the FDP has approved a law in the cabinet that it considers wrong, and that Chancellor Olaf Scholz is contributing “at most political perseverance phrases” instead of leading the troubled government. He demands: “Withdraw the bill.”
Sharp criticism also comes from the AfD and the left. “The heat transition is not feasible, we don’t have enough heat pumps, we don’t have enough craftsmen, we don’t have enough electricity and people certainly don’t have enough money to pay for the madness,” says Marc Bernhard of the far-right party.
Left parliamentary group leader Amira Mohammed Ali is also calling for the “botched up bill” to be withdrawn. 80 percent of the population rejected the project in this form. “These people aren’t all backward-looking or climate deniers. They haven’t all fallen victim to a campaign either,” says Mohammed Ali. She calls for a socially acceptable new start that does not overload the municipalities and protects tenants from modernization costs.
SPD defends law with renewed determination
The SPD, on the other hand, has been defending the heating law with increasing verve for days after public reluctance in recent weeks. Group leader Matthias Miersch accuses the Union of running “a nasty populist campaign where you fool people and play badly with people’s fears.” The Union itself does not provide any proposals for the heat transition, says the social democrat. Making oil and gas more expensive through the CO2 price without first enabling people to switch to renewable technologies would lead to a “price shock”.
The SPD MP Verena Hubertz argues in a similar way: “Doing nothing is social indifference, because then the CO2 price will come and then people will no longer be able to afford it,” says Hubertz, to heat with oil and gas. The energy policy spokeswoman for the SPD parliamentary group, Nina Scheer, calls the Union course “a program of freezing in Germany”. The three SPD speakers are consistently optimistic that in the end there will be a good heating law. Miersch asks the Union “not to give in to populism”. That only strengthens the AfD.
FDP makes demands on traffic lights
The SPD would like to boil down the dispute between the traffic light parties. But Greens politician Andreas Audretsch uses the parliamentary stage prepared by the Union to address the Liberals: The FDP had passed the cabinet draft, party leader Christian Lindner had explicitly pushed for changes in the parliamentary procedure when it was passed. “Let’s break this blockade at this point,” Audretsch appealed to the FDP. “Let’s talk about deadlines, let’s talk about exceptions, let’s talk about how openness to technology, which is the basis of this law, can be worked out even better.”
FDP parliamentary group leader Lukas Köhler does not want to know anything about the blockade. Parliament will improve the draft law, said Köhler, and outlined his party’s demands – after the FDP had remained vague about it at the beginning of the week. It is about openness to technology, about a funding concept, about the coupling to the municipal heat planning. And then there are “a lot of regulatory details in the law and I think they can all get out.” That sounds more like a confrontation than an early agreement.
And the cost of the funding is likely to become a contentious issue: “It must be clear that the state cannot cover all the costs,” says FDP politician Christoph Meyer. So far, it has been envisaged that the subsidies for the heating replacement should come from the climate transformation fund, a special fund of the federal government. It should not happen that the fund is empty after six months, warns Meyer. In other words, the FDP does not want to provide additional tax money for subsidies. However, this limits the amount of possible funding. What a socially just funding landscape can look like and how it can be financed is likely to become a central conflict between the government factions. Nevertheless, Meyer is optimistic: “I’m looking forward to the parliamentary deliberations, which will certainly begin soon.”
The next opportunity would be the session week starting June 12th. Then the heating law could at least be passed by the Bundestag before or in a special session during the summer break. According to the SPD bill, the Federal Council could then pass it in mid-September and people could be certain in good time before 2024 that the new installation of gas and oil heating systems would then actually be prohibited. But the tighter the schedule, the more shaky its foundation.