Lessons from the NRW debacle
FDP wants to force tax cuts
05/17/2022, 4:43 p.m
After heavy losses in the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the FDP wants to flee to the front: instead of blaming others, the liberals are thinking about unfulfilled election promises. According to parliamentary group leader Dürr, these are tax relief and lean approval processes.
After their defeats in the state elections this year, the federal FDP wants to advance their core concerns in the traffic light coalition. FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr named further relief for citizens, social modernization and the acceleration of planning and approval processes as priority projects – also at the expense of citizen participation in such projects.
“In view of the rising inflation, we should certainly talk about additional relief,” said Dürr. “Relief means: the state takes less away from people.” One possibility would be tax relief in the case of so-called cold progression – after all, the state should not be allowed to collect “unjustifiably higher taxes due to inflation”.
Dürr also suggested that the coalition use the planned law to accelerate the construction of liquid gas plants as a “blueprint” for other infrastructure projects such as digitization or decarbonization. The law to increase the use of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) is a reaction to the Russian war in Ukraine and is intended to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian gas. Dürr announced that it would examine whether the provisions of this law could be “transferred to other major projects”.
“Otherwise, that annoys the citizens too”
The LNG law, which is due to be passed in the Bundestag later this week, also includes restrictions on citizen participation in order to speed up implementation. In principle, Dürr spoke out in favor of “concentrated public participation”. This participation is necessary in a democracy – “at the same time it has to go faster, otherwise it would annoy the citizens”.
Dürr admitted that the FDP had recently suffered a “very serious electoral defeat” in the North Rhine-Westphalia election. But now she doesn’t want to “seek the blame with others”, but push her concerns forward. “We agreed on major modernization projects in the coalition agreement,” he said. “We’re going to tackle that. The modernization of our country will continue. The FDP will take care of that.”