If you follow German news this week, there was a fair amount of chatter from the left-wing folks over the idea of a committee or commission, to review the actions carried out with DDR (former East German) companies, and how the actions of the past thirty years....with over 30,000 DDR-government-run operations fell from 'grace' as privatization came to be the norm.
The landscape in the eastern half of Germany, since unification....is 'littered' with people who are long-term unemployed, and the Linke Party wants to resolve what happened, and basically who to blame.
The term 'compensation' or 'reparation'? Well, yeah....that's where this commission would go off and admit German government mistakes, and basically pay people off.
The billions spent by the Kohl, Schroder and Merkel governments? Well....some accusations have been spoken (almost monthly) over the wasteful nature of the money that went into eastern Germany to repair or upgrade infrastructure. A total of 1.3-trillion Euro (yes....roughly 1.7-trillion dollars) went there and some folks are embarrassed over the lack of change, or the wasteful projects funded.
Just bringing up BER (the new Berlin Airport) is now a difficult topic for politicians to handle. We are now working on ninth-year of overtime work to make the new airport operational. For 2019? Zero chance, it'll open, and it's possible it might go into 2021 before planes ever land there.
Would the current CDU-SPD coalition government under Merkel approve such a commission or committee? No. If you open up this Pandora's Box....it means you have to pay someone down the road some kind of compensation for incompetence of government officials. You could be talking about 100,000 Euro per adult, to make things right.
But all of this brings up negativity and anger over the climate existing. For Linke Party, it's positive in a campaign season.
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