Overview
- SPD grassroots activists delivered more than 4,000 signatures to the party leadership to launch a members' petition to preserve the current Bürgergeld.
- Lars Klingbeil called the petition "exactly the wrong signal" and said he remains 100 percent behind the government's plan to tighten benefit obligations.
- The Union–SPD package would replace the current scheme and step up sanctions, including a 30 percent cut after a second missed appointment and a full cutoff after a third, with enactment targeted for spring.
- Under party rules, the petition must win backing from at least 20 percent of members within three months to proceed toward a binding vote if the leadership does not implement its demands; Juso leader Philipp Türmer supports the drive.
- Initiator Franziska Drohsel urges funding via wealth and higher inheritance taxes, while Klingbeil presses to revisit inheritance tax on fairness grounds and praises CSU minister Alexander Dobrindt as a stabilizing force in the coalition.