The Annex: letter a has no date

Today’s annex is the document itself: the law amending Germany’s tobacco tax act, dated 19 October 2026 and published in the Federal Law Gazette, issue 2026 I No. 309, on 20 October¹. It runs to three pages and three articles. It is signed by President Steinmeier, Chancellor Merz and Finance Minister Klingbeil¹.

Article 3. The clause in the headlines is one sentence: “Dieses Gesetz tritt am Tag nach der Verkündung in Kraft” (“This law enters into force on the day after its promulgation”)¹. There is no second paragraph and no separate date for the new rates¹. So everything in the law took effect on 21 October².

Why that matters: letter a. Article 1 replaces the tariff in §2(1). For cigarettes, letters b to e each begin with a period: 1 January to 31 December 2027, then 2028, 2029, and 1 January 2030 to 14 February 2031¹. Letter a has no period. It sets 18.57 cents per cigarette plus 21.05% of the retail price “vorbehaltlich der Buchstaben b bis e”, meaning “subject to letters b to e”¹. Read literally, letter a covers every day that b to e do not, and that includes the rest of 2026. The 2027 rate under letter b is 14.34 cents¹. Desk arithmetic: the text as printed would tax a cigarette this autumn 4.23 cents more than next year. Fine-cut tobacco and cigars follow the same pattern¹.

What the text meant. The rest of the law points one way. Article 1 also allows new tax stamps to be bought five weeks before a change in the tariff, and Article 2 sets stamp-ordering rules that run “bis zum 31. Dezember 2026”¹. Customs gives that as the reason for early entry into force: to allow time to make and order new stamps². Its notice says the old rates apply unchanged until 31 December 2026².

The repair route. The finance ministry wants to use §61 of the federal ministries’ joint rules of procedure, which covers “printing errors and obvious inaccuracies”. After a law has been passed, that needs the consent of the presidents of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat³. The ministry says the error was already in its own draft³. That is why the Cologne constitutional lawyer Markus Ogorek, quoted by Die Welt, doubts the route: “In any case, this is not a mere printing error in the Federal Law Gazette,” he said, because the gap was already in the government draft and parliament did not correct it; and a parliamentary amending law would be the “legally certain way”³.

The receipt so far. No correction had been published in issues up to No. 313 on 21 October³, and by 05:13 on Thursday the Gazette’s site had no issue 314⁴.

The reading. Strip out the embarrassment, and this is a three-page law with one missing date in letter a and one clause, Article 3, too short to rescue it. The fix will also be a document. Read it when it arrives, and check which of the two routes it took.