Germany pushes back at ‘selfish’ claims over energy bailout. “If Germany were to experience a really deep recession, it would drag the whole of Europe down with it,” Robert Habeck said in an interview. “We’re not being selfish — we’re trying to stabilise an economy at the heart of Europe.”
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Germany’s deputy chancellor has hit out at critics of the €200bn energy support package Berlin unveiled last month, denying it was “selfish” and insisting it will help protect the whole European economy.
Some EU member states reacted with surprise and irritation at the German relief package, saying it risked distorting the bloc’s single market. Berlin was accused of failing to properly co-ordinate its response to the energy crisis with its European partners.
The centrepiece of the plan, financed by new borrowing, is a “gas price brake” on energy costs both for companies and private households. Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it a “double ka-boom”.
The package was greeted with relief by hard-pressed German consumers spooked by double-digit inflation and energy prices that have soared since Russia drastically reduced gas supplies to Europe in the summer. Some energy-intensive companies have shut down or reduced production and the government now expects Germany to enter a recession next year.
But some European countries saw the “double ka-boom” as a typical “Germany-first” response to the crisis. Comparisons were even drawn with Berlin’s initial actions during the Covid-19 pandemic when it banned the export of medical protection gear.
In an opinion piece in the Irish Times earlier this month, two EU commissioners, Thierry Breton and Paolo Gentiloni, said the German plan “raises questions”, adding such moves risked “fragmenting the internal market, setting up a race for subsidies and calling into question the principles of solidarity and unity that underpin our European project”.
Habeck, who is deputy chancellor and economy minister, said the criticism of Germany was unfair. “A lot of countries have already taken measures” to cap energy prices, he said.
Scholz last week named Italy, Spain and France as countries that were operating price caps. “France does it on a large scale, largely by subsidising state-owned companies,” he said. “The German programme fits in with all of that quite well.”
His irritation is widely shared in the German government. “For the past 10 years we’ve been lambasted for not investing enough, and now we do, everyone criticises us,” said one official. “It’s like we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
Habeck, a Green, is one of Germany’s most popular politicians, though his reputation took a hit this summer over a gas levy on consumers designed by his ministry to help struggling energy companies such as Uniper hit by the Russian gas shut-off. The levy, which suffered from a series of design flaws, was scrapped after Uniper was nationalised.
He has also been damaged by a fierce row between his party and the liberal Free Democrats — both members of Scholz’s three-party, Social Democrat-led coalition — over whether to extend the lifespans of Germany’s last remaining nuclear power stations.
Speaking in his office in Berlin, Habeck said that Germany had a “good chance” of getting through the winter without blackouts and energy rationing, but only if private households curbed their gas consumption.
“It’s really astonishing that we’ve succeeded in filling storage without Russian gas and in bringing down prices,” he said. “We’re not quite where we need to be, but the price of gas was at €350 per megawatt hour [in the late summer] and now it’s at €160 [per megawatt hour].”
Prices had dropped because Germany’s success at filling its storage facilities — they are now nearly 95 per cent full — had “calmed down the market”, he added.
He also pointed to the actions of Trading Hub Europe, a consortium of transmission system operators that was given €15bn by the government in June to procure gas for storage. “We decided that THE won’t buy the gas at any price,” Habeck said. That in turn had helped to stabilise the market.
But he said that on gas, the government “still have concerns”. “We must reduce consumption,” he said. “That means private households will also have to make a contribution. We can’t order them to do so, of course — they have to do it voluntarily. But I think they will.”
Habeck dismissed criticism from industry that it was not acting quickly enough to solve the energy crisis: some companies have complained that the industrial price cap will only come into effect in January. The head of the chemical industry lobby VCI, Markus Steilemann, warned last week that Germany risked becoming an “industrial museum”.
Habeck said the government could have moved faster on announcing its emergency aid package. “But you first have to figure out politically how you’re going to set up a €200bn fund, and you have to structure it the right way,” he said. “That took time.”
He also defended himself against criticism of the controversial gas levy. He said the idea was not his sole responsibility. “That was a decision we all took together, although others backed away from it later,” he added.
https://www.noz.de/deutschland-welt/politik/artikel/robert-habeck-kritisierte-mondpreise-fuer-gas-aus-usa-43308901
>”Some countries, even friendly ones, sometimes achieve moon prices. Of course, this causes problems that we have to talk about,” said Habeck in an interview with our editorial office. He was counting on “the EU Commission also talking about this with the friendly states”.
“Such solidarity would be good”.
>Habeck has his sights particularly set on the USA: “The USA turned to us when oil prices shot up, and as a result national oil reserves were also tapped in Europe. I think such solidarity would also be good for curbing gas prices,” the Green politician appealed to Washington.
>Habeck also put pressure on Brussels: the EU “should bundle its market power and orchestrate a smart and synchronised purchasing behaviour of the EU states so that individual EU countries do not outbid each other and drive up world market prices”, he demanded. European market power is “enormous”, it just has to be used.
It’s noteworthy that the most vocal critics are either net receiving EU Member States or countries with an outrageous national debt. The most prominent among those are, of course, Orbán accusing Germany of [cannibalism](https://euobserver.com/tickers/156199) and Meloni who suddenly [calls](https://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2022/09/30/meloni-draghi-call-for-unified-eu-response-on-gas-prices_7af3c4ec-9ba3-4fd3-99de-fe3eeed13ff1.html) for a *European* solution.
That’s rich, coming from a lady who herself must have shouted “ITALY FIRST” at least a thousand times during her ultranationalistic campaign and promised to put Italy’s national energy interests first.
So Italy First is OK? Hungary First is OK?
But Germany First isn’t? Then suddenly it’s selfish?
Get lost, bunch of hypocrites. I don’t hear my (the Netherlands) country crying about this. I don’t hear any other fiscally responsible EU Member State crying about Germany helping out its own citizens.
Get your shit together in good times, so you can deal more easily with crises in bad times. Italy has been warned by the EU (and other (financial) institutions) over and over again to do something about its outrageous debt, but it refuses to do so. Instead, they voted for an ultranationalist who promised to do the exact opposite and keep things as they are. And Orbán… Well, that needs no explanation anymore. Maybe if he hadn’t stolen most of EU’s funding, his country would have had some reserves to deal with this. But well, the Hungarian people keep voting for him en masse.