What the Mittelstand wants 13 January 2022
THE BOSSES of Germany’s 3.6m medium-sized and small manufacturing firms would have loved to see last year’s general election yield a pro-business government of the centre-right Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). What the Mittelstand got instead was a pact between the Social Democrats (SPD), the FDP and the Greens. That is still too leftie for many tastes. But it could have been worse. Plenty of chief executives feared that Olaf Scholz, the new SPD chancellor, would row back his pre-election vow not to form a business-bashing coalition that would include Die Linke, a hard-left party.
A disaster averted may be one reason why the Mittelstand is not despondent at the start of the new year. Another is that big chunks of the coalition treaty, which runs the length of a slim novel, “go in the right direction”, says Hans-Jürgen Völz, chief economist of the BVMW, a Mittelstand trade body. Still, several gripes remain.
One is taxation. During the election campaign the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke mooted the idea of re-introducing a wealth tax and raising inheritance taxes. Such a move would hit the Mittelstand’s family firms hard. It now appears to be off the table thanks to opposition from the FDP, whose boss, Christian Lindner, is the new finance minister….
