Revenge is a dish best served cold, and it seems that former Greek minister Panagiotis Lafazanis – a member of the Athenian left at the time of the debt crisis (and more recently in the news for a poster supporting Russia) – is that well white. Now that Germany is in budget difficulties, it is he who explains to Bild how additional funds can be raised. Taking up a recipe that the newspaper itself suggested on March 4, 2010: “Sell your islands”.
Scholz is giving up balancing the budget. A blow to the EU’s rigorists
by our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni, November 24, 2023
In 2010, when the country was in financial difficulties, “Greece did not lack our good advice,” Bild recalls: “Sell your islands, bankrupt Greeks” was the headline in the tabloid itself, and also “very serious,” the newspaper comments today, reporting on the headline from March 4th of that year.
Now Panagiotis Lafazanis71 years old, Minister of Energy and Environment in 2015 below Alexis Tsipras and the finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, it restarts, you hear from Bild. “There are two solutions, said the former minister. “The government should impose emergency taxes on both citizens and businesses,” which would trigger a crisis but bring in significant revenue. Alternatively, consideration could be given to “selling public assets such as islands to quickly raise large sums of money”. “Should Germany therefore sell islands like Sylt or Heligoland?” asks the tabloid.
Lafzanis also mentions the Troika, the trio consisting of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union. “If the Germans cannot keep the situation under control, they will have to come under the supervision of the Troika,” says the former minister.
Meanwhile, the German Chancellor was in parliament Olaf Scholz in person to take stock of the situation. Everything came to a head with the recent ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court, which questioned the use of extra-budgetary funds to support the economy and called for these to be re-offset in the federal budget. A fact that, for Scholz, creates a “new reality” for the current and all “future governments”.
“This ruling creates a new reality for the federal government and for all current and future governments, both federal and regional. A reality that, however, makes it more difficult to achieve important and widely shared goals for our country.” Scholz said in Berlin in a statement to the Bundestag on the current German “budget situation”. “The court recognizes that the usual capacity of a regular budget is not sufficient in these emergency situations,” said the Chancellor.
The Chancellor then confirmed in the Berlin Parliament that his government would request the Bundestag itself to suspend the constitutional provision known as the “debt brake” again. Scholz did not say the word “debt brake”. However, Article 115 of the Basic Law stipulates: “The maximum permissible structural net debt is limited to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product” and thus prescribes a largely balanced budget.