A general view during a session of the German Council (Bundesrat). Michael Kappeler\/dpa <\/p>\n
Germany’s upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, has approved the country’s 2025 federal budget, giving the final green light to a plan worth hundreds of billions of euros.<\/p>\n
The budget, already passed by the Bundestag last week, sets spending at about \u20ac502.5 billion ($594.8 billion), with nearly \u20ac82 billion in new debt in the core budget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Additional billions are earmarked through special funds for the military and infrastructure projects.<\/p>\n
It comes after a row over how to plug a massive spending gap torpedoed the previous government last November.<\/p>\n
The plan covers only a few months. Because of an early federal election and the lengthy process of forming a new government, ministries have been operating under a provisional budget for around nine months, severely limiting their spending flexibility.<\/p>\n
With the new budget in place, government departments now have planning certainty – though only until the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Preparations for the 2026 budget are already underway, with initial debates held this week in the Bundestag.<\/p>\n
Since taking office in May, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government has promised to focus on delivering growth for the crisis-hit German economy, which has seen two consecutive years of recession. A range of measures to boost competitiveness have already come into effect.<\/p>\n
However, Germany faces “one of the most challenging phases” in its recent history amid global turmoil, Merz said earlier this week as he defended his government’s proposed next year’s budget in a major parliamentary debate.<\/p>\n
“A winter, a spring, a summer and another autumn of reforms will follow,” Merz predicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A general view during a session of the German Council (Bundesrat). Michael Kappeler\/dpa Germany’s upper house of parliament,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[152253,2000,299,63395,1945,152252,1824,72548,20134],"class_list":{"0":"post-453101","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-core-budget","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-federal-budget","12":"tag-friedrich-merz","13":"tag-german-council","14":"tag-germany","15":"tag-government-departments","16":"tag-spending"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}