Three hours late, €555 billion long: the budget committee's night begins after lunch

The most powerful committee in the Bundestag started its most important day with a computer problem. The budget committee’s clean-up session (Bereinigungssitzung) on the 2027 budget was moved from 11:00 to 14:00, according to an email from the committee secretariat seen by dpa: IT restrictions were slowing the processing of the large number of short-notice amendment sheets, with more still coming in¹.

Those amendment sheets (Deckblätter) are the unglamorous point of the exercise. The coalition leaders settled the big quarrels on Wednesday; now every minister has to appear once more and defend their spending, and several million euros usually move around before the budget gets the green light late at night². Deutschlandfunk notes that these sessions typically run into the early hours of the next day, and that the latest tax estimate feeds into the final changes³.

The frame is large. Under the coalition’s plans, core spending is around €555 billion, the most the federal government has ever spent, financed partly with €118.7 billion in new borrowing; with the credit-financed special funds for infrastructure and the Bundeswehr, total debt is expected to exceed €200 billion². The finance ministry says it closed an initial gap of about €34 billion, though not only through savings: through a sugar tax, a plastic-packaging tax, higher tobacco tax and more tax on alcohol and crypto assets, several of which have since been reopened².

What is still open is the electricity-tax cut for all firms and households that the Union wants, because nobody has found the money; dpa says it could in theory be decided after the session¹. Handelsblatt calls finding the roughly €5 billion needed for 2027 “extremely unlikely”². To balance the books, more may have to come out of a reserve that was meant to be kept for 2028, a year whose financial plan already has a hole of more than €25 billion².

For you, the useful document is not tonight’s press statement but the committee’s printed list of changes. Desk arithmetic: €118.7 billion of borrowing against €555 billion of spending is a little over one euro in five. That ratio, not any slogan, is what the vote at the end of November will lock in.