Now the Union does the arithmetic – and runs into itself

In sitting weeks the board of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand, the body in which the business wing of the Union parliamentary group is organised, meets on Wednesdays. According to the group’s own flyer it has 166 members of parliament; it has been chaired since 2011 by Christian von Stetten.^[10][11] On 14 October 2026 the subject there was the federal budget. WELT reported on this meeting and quoted several participants.^[1]

This piece reproduces the meeting only as far as WELT reported it, and says so at every point. The figures at issue it checks itself.

What the figures say

The Federal Court of Audit presented its analysis of the state of the federal finances on 3 September 2026. In it it calculates that in 2027 the federal budget and the two special funds for the armed forces and for infrastructure and climate neutrality together finance around 32 per cent of budgeted spending on credit. Net borrowing in the core budget comes to 118.7 billion euros. The report states that no thoroughgoing consolidation is discernible, and objects that more than a third of the consolidation amount announced is not specified in the draft. A planned withdrawal of seven billion euros from a reserve does not in fact exist.^[3]

The federal government must now leave the road into the debt trap.

With this sentence the Federal Court of Audit sums up its analysis.^[3]

According to the draft budget, interest spending rises from 30.3 billion euros in 2026 to 41.9 billion in 2027. The financial plan continues the series: 55.2 billion in 2028, 68.1 billion in 2029, 80.7 billion in 2030.^[2] While the budget as a whole grows by around six per cent, interest spending increases by a good 38 per cent.^[2] For 2030 the Federal Court of Audit also sees a risk that federal debt will grow to three trillion euros.^[3]

The ratio that is in dispute

Set against these amounts are the planned excise duties. The sugar tax is to apply from 1 July 2027, at 26 cents per litre for 5 to under 8 grams of sugar per 100 millilitres and 32 cents from 8 grams; 690 million euros are expected for 2027 and 925 million for 2028.^[4] The plastic tax provides for 550 euros per tonne of plastic in packaging and is expected to bring in around 1.5 billion euros a year from 2028.^[5]

Together that is around 2.4 billion euros a year for 2028. The rise in interest spending in a single year – from 2026 to 2027 – amounts to 11.6 billion euros. The two new taxes cover a good fifth of it. This comparison is a calculation by this editorial team from the official figures; it is set out under Method.

This is exactly where the business wing comes in. According to the WELT report, the participants at the meeting saw no promising source of revenue in the two levies, because they are designed as steering taxes: manufacturers would change recipes and replace plastic, as happened after comparable taxes in the United Kingdom – so the revenue would fall as planned while the resentment remained.^[1]

The treasurer of the Parlamentskreis, CDU member of parliament Lukas Krieger, told WELT that they had “clear reservations” about all the taxes named and saw a need for adjustment. Higher taxes alone would not solve the problem; more had to be saved. He regards the agreed saving of two per cent in ministry budgets as too little; five would be nearer the mark.^[1]

The lever: drafting assistance is not a bill

On the sugar tax there is a procedural particularity that the WELT report brings out and that can be traced in the cabinet decision. On 14 October 2026 the cabinet did not adopt a bill of its own, but drafting assistance for the coalition parliamentary groups.^[4] The tax is therefore introduced by a motion from the Union group and the SPD, not by the federal government.

From this follows a point of leverage which WELT describes in its report: if the Union group does not table the motion, the tax will come too late to take effect for the 2027 budget. According to the report, chairman von Stetten is pressing for the excise duty plans to be cut back, and is prepared to accept that the budget will be settled in December rather than by the end of November.^[1]

The conflict also runs inwards

This is the part that goes beyond the usual coalition quarrel. According to the report, the budget politicians of the group itself think nothing of the initiative. Their objection: the result was negotiated with the SPD over a long period and has already been shifted from the finance ministry’s draft in the direction of the expert commission; reopening it now would cost more in trust within the coalition than the tax is worth. From their own constituencies there are no complaints about the levy anyway.^[1]

So within the same parliamentary group two readings stand opposed: for the business wing the tax is a bad deal measured against the state of the budget; for the budget politicians it is a negotiated result whose cancellation would cost more than it yields. Nothing has been decided.

What has been decided in the meantime

While sugar and plastic are being argued over, on the evening of 15 October 2026 the Bundestag adopted the step-by-step increase in tobacco duty. The Union and the SPD voted in favour, all the other groups against, as did two members of the Union group.^[6][7][8] For a packet of 20 cigarettes the draft gives an average retail price of 8.77 euros from 2027, 9.56 euros in 2028, 10.42 euros in 2029 and 11.36 euros in 2030. The additional revenue rises from around 756 million euros in 2027 to 3.59 billion euros in 2030.^[7][8] Fine-cut, pipe tobacco, heated tobacco, waterpipe tobacco and substitutes are affected too.^[8]

In parallel there is a ministerial draft from the finance ministry of 30 September 2026, under which crypto assets would in future count as capital assets and gains from them would be subject, regardless of the holding period, to 25 per cent withholding tax, or 26.375 per cent including the solidarity surcharge. Holdings acquired by the end of 2026 are to remain protected.^[9] The CDU’s economic council rejects these plans too.^[12]

What is open

Whether the Union group will in fact hold back the motion on the sugar tax is open; the group’s leadership has made no commitment on this. On the plastic tax, group chairman Thorsten Frei has stated that the draft in this form cannot be agreed to – that is a statement about the paper, not about the levy.^[5] And the 2027 budget has not been adopted. Nobody has yet put a public figure on how the gap would be closed that would arise if both taxes fell away.

This piece is a background report and contains no assessment. The statements about the meeting of the Parlamentskreis Mittelstand come from a WELT report of 15 October 2026 and are marked as such in the text; Die Aufrechte Lupe has not been able to confirm them independently. All other statements have been checked against the official sources named.