The Finance Minister proposed a new agreement between the “liberal democracies”.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, in an interview with the media at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that Germany has overcome dependence on energy resources that were previously supplied from Russia.
As he said in an interview with BBC journalists, which appeared on January 19, Germany still depends on imported energy carriers, but Russia is not among the suppliers, and Russian imports do not affect the situation in the country’s energy sector.
Dependence remains only on the world markets, Lindner stressed.
According to the minister, Germany has agreed to resume the operation of local coal-fired power plants, and plans to open three nuclear power plants have been postponed.
In addition, the authorities have increased the capacity that was given to the storage of natural gas supplied from abroad, specifically from Norway and the USA.
Lindner said that Germany has come to understand that after Chancellor Angela Merkel, the country needs to strengthen its competitiveness.
Speaking about the Merkel period, he said that then the country was developing the strengths of the past.
“Now we are developing the strengths of the future,” he stressed.
Recall that Germany refused to import Russian oil at the beginning of 2023, gas stopped flowing to the German side after sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
The head of the German Finance Ministry also called for the achievement of a global agreement on trade of several liberal democracies and the restoration of relations with the United States, which arose due to the law on reducing inflation.
Lindner called for stopping the competition between the parties on the amount of subsidies. It can become a threat to the sustainability of state finances in Europe, the minister believes.
“We don’t need a trade war, we need trade diplomacy”, – he said.
As TASS reminds, the inflation law adopted in the United States gave large subsidies to companies – manufacturers of electric vehicles, batteries and equipment for energy with the condition that the goods are manufactured in the United States. In Europe, they decided that the harbinger of a transatlantic trade war.
According to the head The European Commission of Ursula von der Leyen, the EU should form a protectionist policy of the Union in response to the economic innovations of the United States.
Earlier, Topnews wrote that from February 1, according to the decree of the President of the Russian Federation, oil supplies under the ceiling set by the EU and the USA are prohibited.