Tuesday, December 24, 2024

When Habeck conjures up ideas from the green sack as Santa Claus during the election campaign

FR When Habeck conjures up ideas from the green sack as Santa Claus during the election campaign Moritz Post • 16 hours • 3 minutes reading time Post column Shortly before Christmas, Chancellor Olaf Scholz clears the way for new elections. And Robert Habeck discovers Christmas populism for himself. What a contemplative time it could be: In the snow, only parcel delivery people and bicycle couriers are bustling about on the streets. Meanwhile, the people who can afford it come together in their comfortably heated apartments. There, they laugh together, drink warmed-up red wine and, by consuming speculaas, chocolate Santa Clauses and chocolates, do everything they can to contract type 2 diabetes in the last days of 2024. If it weren't for the annoying federal politics! Question of confidence and new elections - a politicized Christmas Now, of all times, Berlin is sending out signs of uncertainty. The Chancellor is asking the question of confidence at precisely the time when people should be spending their money. As an observer, you cannot approve of that. After all, it is about strengthening the German economy through consumption. Everything is connected: the butcher, the showman, the sausage buyer at the Christmas market. The suppliers, the car manufacturer, the mid-range SUV under the Christmas tree. Instead of sweating in their thick down jackets to the sound of “Last Christmas” in the crowded shopping center to buy the last Christmas presents, people are glued to their smartphones and in front of the television to watch the news. Instead of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke, people in 2024 will be reading the parties' manifestos for the new election in February. Politics at Christmas time: Habeck's populist demands for the federal election As if the family coming together on Christmas days did not offer enough potential for conflict! Now the discussion in the family circle is inevitable as to whether Friedrich Merz from the CDU or Olaf Scholz from the SPD would make the better chancellor. Until late in the evening, the drunken aunt realizes that the crazy blonde from the right-wing extremists "is sometimes right with what she says." And while the heating is already turned up to level 5 and there is a dispute about the heating law, Santa Claus Robert Habeck suddenly appears at the door with his sack, from which he keeps pulling out new ideas for the election campaign. The latest find in the green Christmas sack: Robert Habeck is calling for a billionaire tax, the proceeds of which should be used to renovate schools in the Federal Republic. This is feel-good Christmas populism and fits in with the time of the festival of Christian charity. The fact that taxes cannot be levied by the federal government for specific purposes, that the states have sovereignty over education policy and that school construction is a matter for the municipalities and districts is of course not mentioned in Habeck's Christmas story. Habeck's wealth tax plans are causing anger among billionaires Just thinking about such a tax is causing the country's billionaires to rebel against Christmas: for them, the introduction of a wealth tax is even further removed from reality than the story of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, which the world's largest religious community tells itself every year in December. This year, the billionaires have chosen the role of Ebenezer Scrooge based on Dickens' model. Instead of the Christmas story, Olaf Piepenbrock, managing partner of the Piepenbrock Group, is now telling the fairy tale of "communist-green redistribution". When it comes to your own billions, even if you didn't earn them yourself and have hardly given anything back to the community due to tax privileges on inheritance and gifts from companies, you just invent your own fairy tale of charity. Even if you are always closest to yourself. Oh, you beautiful Christmas time!