If Olaf Solz had been a different character, he might have expressed more loudly what he merely hinted at in his feud with Christian Lindner. Their row was indeed due to the chancellor’s desire to deactivate the infamous “debt brake” for 2025, so that the government could run a relatively small deficit in order to finance some policies, especially in the social sector. Or to be precise, to be able to continue to finance war spending, which would otherwise have to be found through cuts – from where else? – from the social sector.

Everything together is not done

Even those who don’t like Olaf Solz have to “give” him credit for being soft-spoken but honest. Certainly trapped in a fiscal “devil’s triangle”. In one corner the constitutional rule for zero deficits. On the other, the needs of the people of a state, which is considered the richest in Europe, but is steadily getting worse. And in the last corner the support obligations of Ukraine. A total of 30 billion has been spent on military aid and another 12 billion annually on the support of Ukrainians who have found refuge in Germany. But also the plans for even more “defense”.

Only a stupid populist can pretend not to understand that it is impossible for all the corners of the triangle to be… green. Some will blush. You can sustain a war and have a balanced budget by cutting social spending. Conversely, you can keep the welfare state at a decent level either by creating new debt, or by ceasing to sponsor the war. All three together is not possible. And Christian Lindner knows this very well, who in order to save himself electorally set up this whole drama, using the old script of “fiscal responsibility”, which, despite its tragic consequences, Wolfgang Schäuble did not finally take with him to the other world.

An economy in decline

The Germans are therefore being served a reheated recipe of “responsibility towards the new generations”, which they had had enough of hearing in the last decade. So how responsible do the supporters of this theory feel towards today’s generation that doesn’t see the trains go by, squeezes in endless queues every day for hours on congested highways that are permanently “under repair”, that saw bridges fall, hears about kindergartens closing and has to wait months for a visit to a public hospital? These are the results of the policy responsibility of the Swabian housewife, the “unheralded” Finance Minister of the Merkel era.

With this reheated soup, it seems Christian Lindner’s party will go to the elections, after he found no other proposal for a real reconstruction of the economy after three years in the ministry. In the end he had ended up just a bearer of bad news and unsolved numerical equations. And he decided to make a heroic exit, wearing the mantle of responsibility. This is modern populism with a neoliberal cloak, especially when two days before your exit, you speak at a meeting of businessmen, promise tax cuts and lash out with simplistic parables against those who talk about redistribution of wealth.

A European affair

The dilemma or better “trilemma” of Mr. Solz is therefore of all Germany, but ultimately also of all Europe. You cannot be fiscally orthodox and armed like a lobster and consistent with your elementary social obligations. At a time when Europe says it is willing to maintain a more efficient military, feed a voracious defense industry, and at the same time discusses a return to fiscal “piety,” it is essentially sending a message to society that it will have to forgo even basic benefits, which were taken for granted for decades. And when this happens in rich Germany one can only guess what will happen in other countries that already have deficits of 5 or 6 or 7%. The social cost of this choice will be enormous. The side effects are unpredictable.

This is a debate that needs to be had in the run-up to the German elections, precisely because it goes beyond the narrow German borders and concerns the whole of Europe. Regardless of what Trump does and whether and how the war in Ukraine ends. Especially the social democrats who collapsed within three years because of their own, but not only their own past mistakes have only one option if they want to recover. They need to speak clearly and try to make the voter realize what exactly is “at play” here. Otherwise, they will leave the extremes, not only of the Right, but also of the Center completely free to “plough” in the coming months to reap at the polls.