In the grand opera of German pension politics — a performance already groaning under the weight of stale plotlines and overripe actors — the CDU has now declared, with all the obstinacy of a mule in a rainstorm, that the government’s pension package will not be substantively altered. Jens Spahn, ever the dutiful herald of the parliamentary Right, repeated this with the solemnity of a man announcing that gravity will continue to function. At the Young Union’s gathering in Rust, he offered — as if bestowing a gift rather than admitting defeat — merely to “continue the conversation.”
Meanwhile, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that high priest of fiscal orthodoxy, stepped forward to proclaim his support for the package. Yes, he will vote for it “in good conscience,” he assured the public, a phrase invariably deployed when conscience has been safely tranquillised. He knows, he says, that this is but the opening act of a grander drama: nothing less than the wholesale re-engineering of Germany’s social architecture. A noble ambition, though one suspects the coalition agreed to this “restructuring” with the same enthusiasm with which one agrees to a root canal.
The Young Union, ever keen to remind its elders that youthful indignation is not yet an extinct species, complains that the pension plan wasn’t in the coalition agreement and will bleed the treasury of another 118 billion euros. For this reason — or perhaps simply for the sport of it — they threaten to vote against it.
Spahn, attempting statesmanship, calls the agreed safeguard on pension levels a “compromise.” Indeed it is: the SPD, for whom this issue is sacred scripture, received its offering just as the CDU/CSU received its own prize on migration. Each side goes home clutching its fetish, insisting the other should be grateful.
The coalition agreement, for what it’s worth, enshrined the pension level at 48 percent until 2031. The new draft law — blessed by the cabinet and Merz alike — would keep that level roughly a percentage point higher even after 2031. A small mercy, though one suspects the whole arrangement is held together with wishful thinking and bits of political duct tape.
