Germany’s constitutional court has repeatedly proved its readiness to be a pain in the backside of want-to-get-it-done policymakers. It has long been weaponised by opponents of the European Central Bank: in 2020, it infamously usurped the European Court of Justice’s authority to interpret European law, over quantitative easing. Last Wednesday, idomestic economic policy was torpedoed by the country’s top court.
The judges in Karlsruhe barred a €60 billion budgetary move made in the early days of the coalition government of social democrats, liberals and greens. Because of the pandemic, the strict rules of the “debt brake” limiting public borrowing were still suspended in 2021. When the government took office late that year, it used a supplementary budget – for 2021 even if passed in 2022 – to shift unused borrowing authorisation from the main budget into a separate off-budget multiyear fund for green investment