O contexto a mudar

Interessante, o capítulo 5 de "Kaput - The End of the German Miracle" de Wolfgang Munchau, intitulado "Breaking the brake".

O brake é a chamada Schuldenbremse (freio da dívida), regra que limita severamente a capacidade do governo de contrair novas dívidas. Ele argumenta que essa restrição orçamental tem levado a uma falta crónica de investimentos públicos, prejudicando o crescimento económico e a competitividade da Alemanha a longo prazo. BTW, Münchau explora como a aplicação rígida do freio da dívida e outras políticas de austeridade contribuíram para a fragmentação política do país e a ascensão dos partidos populistas.

Entretanto no jornal The Times de ontem, no artigo "Merz prepares to move fast and break Germany's spending rules" pode ler-se:

"He [Moi ici: Merz] is also in a race against time to identify a way of paying for Germany's biggest rearmament in 70 years as the price for a seat at the head of the table. The scale of the task is colossal. If Germany is to reach Nato's new de facto benchmark and spend 3 per cent of its GDP on defence, it will need to find at least another €70 billion a year.

The cost of building enough military capacity for true independence from the US would be €615 billion, the Dezernat Zukunft think tank estimated. In parallel with the coalition talks, Merz is attacking the problem with a characteristically unorthodox gambit. His plan is to borrow as much as €200 billion through a mechanism known as a Sondervermögen (special fund). The pot of money would be kept off the regular balance sheet and so would not technically breach Germany's constitutional "debt brake" on government borrowing. 

...

Instead, he proposes to ram the change through the outgoing Bundestag, which has not yet been dissolved and can theoretically be kept on life support for about another three weeks. The SPD is expected to hold out for loosening the debt brake itself, which would open the doors for a splurge on schools, transport and green schemes. Here the party is in good company. The rule, which was written into the constitution in 2009 during the eurozone crisis, used to be an overwhelmingly popular symbol of German prudence, nicknamed the "black zero".

Debt brake reform is now championed by such unlikely figures as the president of Germany's central bank and Merkel, the chancellor who created the instrument in the first place.

A poll last month ago found 55 per cent of Germans, and the same proportion of CDU-CSU voters, wish to see the debt brake softened or abolished."

De acordo com o capítulo 3 do livro de Munchau nada garante que o dinheiro público não vai ser utilizado como soro para manter vivos os zombies do costume.