BERLIN — The
German government on Sunday unveiled a new
multi-billion euro plan to help households cope with soaring prices, and said
it was eyeing windfall profits from energy companies to help fund the relief.
اضافة اعلان
German businesses
and consumers are feeling the pain from sky-high energy prices, as
Europe’s
biggest economy seeks to extricate itself from reliance on Russian supplies in
the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Rapid measures to
prepare for the coming cold season will ensure that Germany would “get through
this winter,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at the unveiling of the
65-billion-euro package.
The latest
agreement, which brings total relief to almost 100 billion euros since the
start of the
Ukraine war, was hammered out overnight into Sunday by Germany’s
three-way ruling coalition of Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens, and the
liberal FDP.
Among the
headline measures are one-off payments to millions of vulnerable pensioners and
a plan to skim off energy firms’ windfall profits.
The government’s
latest relief package came two days after Russian energy giant Gazprom said it
would not restart gas deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Saturday as
planned after a three-day maintenance.
The government
had made “timely decisions” to avoid a winter crisis, Scholz said, including
filling gas stores and restarting coal power plants.
But preventative
measures, including a drive to reduce consumption, have done little to break a
sharp increase in household bills.
Third package
The latest announcement follows two previous relief packages totaling 30
billion euros, which included a reduction in the tax on petrol and a popular
heavily subsidized public transport ticket.
But with the
expiration of many of those measures at the end of August and consumer prices
still on an upward march, the government has been under pressure to provide new
support.
Inflation rose
again to 7.9 percent in August, after falling for two straight months thanks to
previous government relief measures.
Scholz said,
however, that not everyone is suffering from the high consumer prices.
Some
energy companies which may not be using gas to generate electricity could “simply use
the fact that the high price of gas determines the price of electricity and are
therefore making a lot of money,” he said.
“We have
therefore resolved to change the market organization in such a way that these
random profits no longer occur or that they are skimmed off.”
The trimming of
windfall profits would create “financial headroom that should be used
specifically to relieve the burden for consumers in Europe,” the government
said in its policy paper.
The move could
potentially bring “double-digit billions” of euros in relief, finance minister
Christian Lindner estimated in the press conference.
The government
said it would seek to implement the measure through a reform of the European
energy market in the first instance, before forging ahead on its own.
Energy companies
were earning “insane amounts of money” under the current system, Economy
Minister
Robert Habeck said in a statement.
Brussels on
Monday said it would prepare “emergency” action to reform the electricity
market and bring prices under control.
‘Never walk alone’
Repeating his mantra that Germans will “never walk alone” through the
energy crisis, the chancellor unveiled a raft of measures, including a one-off
payment of 300 euros to millions of pensioners to help them cover rising power
bills.
The government
will similarly target students with a smaller one-time transfer of 200 euros,
and a heating cost payment for people receiving housing benefits.
Berlin also set
aside 1.5 billion euros for work on a successor to the wildly popular nine-euro
monthly ticket on local and regional transport networks.
The relief
package as a whole should be financed without planning to take on further debt,
Lindner said.
“These measures
are included within the government’s existing budget plans,” covering 2022 and
2023, he said, with the remainder covered by the windfall energy profit
measures.
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