Germany's Habeck pitches spending cap reform to disillusioned voters

By Thomas Escritt

The new leader of Germany's Greens pitched his party on Sunday as the only one that could save Germany from years of stagnation under a renewed grand coalition and offered the conservative frontrunners cooperation on reforming a totemic spending cap.

Robert Habeck, economy minister in Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government which collapsed 10 days ago, was anointed the party's candidate for the Feb. 23 election by 96% of delegates at the national congress in Wiesbaden.

His candidacy means he would be the party's nominee to head the government in the unlikely event the party comes from fourth position in opinion polls to win the election, or could become a senior minister if the Greens became a junior coalition partner.

"We Greens want to carry on bearing responsibility," Habeck, a philosopher and novelist, said. "Perhaps even into the Chancellor's office."

The speech, stressing a desire to serve, seemed designed to sharpen the contrast between him and Friedrich Merz, the irascible and outburst-prone leader of the conservatives whose 16-point opinion poll lead over Scholz's SPD looks almost unassailable with three months to go.

Habeck offered to work with Merz on reforming the constitutionally enshrined spending limit known as the debt brake even before the election: a seemingly generous offer that also picks at ill-concealed divisions between fiscal disciplinarians and bigger spenders in Merz's camp.

February's federal election comes as fierce competition from China, a new protectionist mood across the Atlantic and years of cumulative underinvestment pitch Europe's largest economy into its deepest crisis in decades.

But while voters' mood is anti-incumbent, Habeck and Scholz are betting that Merz's lead is not down to their affection for the arch-conservative.

Habeck's pitch seemed tailored to appeal to centrists who voted for the conservatives during the 13 years of Angela Merkel's relatively stable chancellorship but who are put off by Merz's certitudes.

"Habeck embodies that calm," said poll expert Thomas Gschwend of Mannheim University. "He is trying to get the old Merkel voters: they don't have anywhere to go at the moment."

Offhand references in his speeches to philosophers like Kant and Hegel recall Merkel letting herself be photographed on holiday reading dense, scholarly tomes in what political analysts said was aimed at reassuring liberal middle class voters that she was a serious thinker they could put their trust in.

But it is precisely Merkel's governments' heavy bets on Russian energy that he seeks to repudiate, and not everyone is convinced by his centrism.

"His left-green ideology is poison for the economy and a threat to jobs and welfare," said Bijan Djir-Sarai, of the neoliberal Free Democrats, Habeck's erstwhile coalition partner.