Finance Minister Christian Lindner steers the EU’s biggest economy back on an austerity course. He hopes to catch inflation again after the billions in aid during the crisis. But his zeal also drew criticism.
It’s a phrase that sums up Christian Lindner’s second budget. “We are returning to the debt brake,” the German finance minister (FDP) said on Wednesday afternoon in Berlin. He sees this as a “clear signal” to Europe: the German budget is the EU’s “gold standard”. Big debts must come to an end.
On Wednesday, Lindner drew a straight line back to 2010, when the debt brake was invented. Those were the times of a political metaphor: the Swabian housewife. Angela Merkel named this ideal of the German economy in times of the euro crisis. “You cannot live beyond your means in the long run,” said the former CDU chancellor at the time as the envisioned figure’s motto. The saying has become the mantra of German fiscal policy.