“Not a nice picture made”
Habeck on traffic lights: “We also laugh a lot”
04/09/2023 10:17 am
The new budget, highway expansion and heating replacement: There have been many contentious issues in the traffic lights in recent weeks. Nevertheless, it still seems to fit between people. Vice Chancellor Habeck admits that the coalition “didn’t present a nice image” to the outside world.
Despite the sometimes tough substantive disputes within the traffic light, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck described the “human understanding” in the coalition as very good. “Despite many challenges and a lot of work, we also laugh a lot,” said the Federal Minister of Economics to the newspapers of the Funke media group.
At the same time, the Greens politician warned the alliance: “It is important that we concentrate on the actual task of acting for Germany – and not for our own Twitter followers.” He does not want to deny “that we as a government have not given a nice picture in the past few weeks,” said the Green politician. “Sometimes the tone was too harsh. In this case, however, it is necessary for us to struggle with one another to find the right solution.” He added: “We don’t want to make ourselves comfortable and sit it out like the grand coalition.”
Habeck emphasized that the most recent coalition committee of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP had resolved blockages in terms of content. “Since then, three laws from my area alone have been unified that have been stuck: the energy efficiency law, the building energy law and the reform of competition law. The cabinet has already passed the latter; the two energy laws will follow this month.”
Before the coalition committee, Habeck had expressed his dissatisfaction with the current state of the traffic light coalition. “We have an order to do something for the people, for Germany and at the moment we are not doing enough enough,” he said at the time in the ARD “Tagesthemen”. In the weeks before, there had been numerous discussions between the traffic light parties, from expanding the motorway to a ban on new oil and gas heating systems to the upcoming budget for 2024.