Latest news with #BrittaHasselmann
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Germany's Greens threaten to torpedo massive debt spending deal
A massive plan to loosen Germany's debt rules and spend hundreds of billions on defence and infrastructure has run into potentially decisive opposition from the Greens, whose votes in parliament would be essential for passage. Green politicians have been warning for days that the massive spending deal doesn't do nearly enough to address climate change and might be used as a way to finance tax cuts instead of dramatically higher overall spending. Green parliamentary group co-chairwomen Katharina Dröge and Britta Hasselmann said on Monday that they would recommend that Green lawmakers vote against the package. Dröge said that the conservative CDU/CSU alliance and the centre-left Social Democrats wanted to create a massive fund of borrowed money to put towards things like tax breaks and diesel fuel subsidies for farmers. The Greens have been demanding more funding for climate priorities and greater commitments about how the money would be spent. The spending deal was struck by the CDU/CSU, which won February's German election, and the SPD, who are expected to become the junior coalition partners in the next government. But the votes of the Greens are essential to enacting the deal, since Germany's strict balanced-budget rules are anchored in the country's constitution and any changes require a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of German parliament. The deal between the CDU/CSU and SPD would create a €500 billion ($542 billion) special fund for infrastructure investments to be spent over the next decade, and enable far higher long-term military budgets by permanently exempt any defence spending above 1% of German gross domestic product (GDP) from counting toward the debt rules.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
German Greens relieved after controversial migration bill rejected
Germany's Greens have expressed relief after a controversial bill to tighten migration policy tabled by the opposition centre-right CDU/CSU bloc failed to garner a majority in parliament. The co-leader of the Greens' parliamentary group Britta Hasselmann called the result good news after a very difficult day in parliament. At the same time, she said, events in recent days showed "large cracks" had become visible in the democratic centre. "Nobody can be happy about that." She was referring to the fact that the conservatives had been willing to rely on votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to pass the bill. Had they succeeded, that would have been a historic first, as all of Germany's mainstream parties have ruled out cooperating with the anti-immigration AfD, which is being monitored as a suspected right-wing extremist party by domestic intelligence. The other parliamentary group co-leader Katharina Dröge accused the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, of blackmailing the other parties to push through the vote. The conservatives, she said, had acted according to the motto: "Agree, otherwise we will vote with the Nazis." "You can already see how destructive it is for parliamentary democracy when democratic forces start forming alliances with the far right," she added.
