Jamaica coalition talks productive before collapse – report

The parties negotiating a ‘Jamaica coalition’ in Germany had made a lot of progress on energy and climate policy, as well as on several other policy areas, before the pro-market FDP party pulled out of the talks, Cerstin Gammelin and Markus Balser report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. According to leaked working papers from the talks, the FDP, the environmentalist Green Party, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance agreed to invest around 11 billion euros out of a total investment budget of over 45 billion euros in a so-called “environment and development” package. This package foresees massive investment in the modernisation of heating systems, and includes financial incentives for companies to move to regions where jobs are about to disappear due to the closure of coal plants and coal mines. The package is one of three sets of measures that were to be implemented “with priority”, the authors write.

Read the article in German here.

For background, read CLEW’s coalition watch and the article German coalition talks collapse despite progress on climate and energy.