Merz is effectively stuck between the demands of young conservatives to reconsider the pension package and the obduracy of his SPD coalition partners, who say they’re not willing to renegotiate it.
“Let me be perfectly clear: There will be no further changes to this law,” SPD Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said. “We will pass it in the Bundestag.”
The pension issue has become particularly thorny as Germany’s baby-boomer generation enters retirement, with millions of people leaving the workforce and far fewer entering it. Pensions are the largest single item of public expenditure in the country.
At the heart of the internal rebellion is a proposal to stabilize pension benefits after 2031. Young conservatives argue that this plan goes further than what was originally agreed by the coalition, and would mean over €115 billion in additional costs by 2040.
The internecine dispute has led some in Merz’s coalition — including his own family minister, Karin Prien — to propose postponing the pension reform vote to avoid the kind of embarrassment and open discord that could potentially lead to the coalition’s unravelling.
“It is important that fair solutions for the broad majority are found in parliament,” Prien told German newspaper Handelsblatt.