Austerity is going to hit us all like an SUV plowing into a pedestrian. Berlin’s government, the Senat formed by the conservative CDU and the social democratic SPD, has agreed to a budget for 2025 with three billion euros in cuts. As rbb reports, everything in the city is going to get worse:
- the transportation budget will be cut by 660 million euros. Soon, a monthly train ticket will go from €29 to €71 — an increase of almost 250%. The “social ticket” for unemployed people will more than double in price, from €9 to €19.
- this also means that big investments in public transport, like new tram lines and electric busses, will be cancelled.
- new bike lanes will also be cancelled — even though they barely cost anything.
- another 350 million euros are being cut from education, youth, and family programs. This means schools will have fewer, and worse paid, teachers, as their facilities continue to crumble. Day care is already in crisis, and will only get worse.
- some 40 percent will be cut from programs against gender-based violence, including women’s shelters.
- the biggest protests so far have been in the cultural sector, where 130 million euros — 12 percent of the budget — are disappearing. Theaters and museums will have to reduce their offers. The Free Museum Sundays are over.
- and as rents explode, the government is cutting hundreds of millions of euros from affordable housing.
This is just a few highlights of what’s getting worse. Some line items are not getting cut, however:
- the Polizei budger is set to go up by about 3 percent — all the repression against the Palestine solidarity movement is not cheap!
- the government wants to keep building the inner-city highway A100 through Friedrichshain — which is projected to cost 1.8 billion euros for a few kilometers, making it the most expensive highway ever built in Germany.
- there is also no shortage of money for deporting people to Afghanistan, which requires paying indirect bribes to the Taliban.
When politicians say there is no money, it’s fascinating how they completely ignore the 100 billion euro “special fund” for the military (on top of the military budget of over 50 billion each year).
Another number: Germany’s billionaires pay very little in taxes. If they paid the same rate they owed just a few decades ago, the state could easily get 100 billion euros in extra revenue. When the corporate landlord Vonovia swallowed its competitor Deutsche Wohnen, it used a tax trick to avoid one billion euros in taxes. Generally, realty speculators pay almost no taxes in Berlin. In other words, the cuts to our standard of living will subsidize German oligarchs.
The worst part about austerity is its long-term effects. The ongoing crisis at the BVG is the result of austerity policies from 20 years ago, under the social democratic finance senator Thilo Sarrazin (who has since become Germany’s most shameless racist demagogue). Investments that get cancelled now will be felt for decades to come.
Yet nothing will happen without resistance. Culture workers have already organized demonstrations. The GEW union, which organizes teachers and daycare workers, has called for a one-day strike on December 5 (part of a long series of teachers’ strikes).
With Germany set to go to the polls on February 23, there is a surprising level of consensus among German parties. They want fighter jets instead of electric busses. They want us to be poorer so that a handful of Nazi billionaires can get even bigger yachts. Even the left party Die Linke offers no alternative: they have often been in government in Berlin, and they have carried out the exact same austerity programs as the SPD and the CDU.
When they demand more money from us each month to take the train, they are handing our cash straight to the arms industry. In order to defend our standard of living, and maybe even improve it a bit, we need to say: not one cent for militarism!
