The surprise in the administration of Minister of State Claudia Roth was great when the KNA news agency published a report on Tuesday evening that read that the budget of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media was to be cut by 5.6 percent in the coming year. The KNA referred to the budget draft of the federal government. Roth’s budget will drop from 2.3 billion euros to 2.2 billion euros. When asked by the Tagesspiegel, a spokesman for the Minister of State for Culture explained: “In the report, the government draft for 2023 was compared with the federal culture budget for 2022, which has already come into force. However, the rule applies to compare drafts with drafts and budget laws with budget laws.” This means that every budget draft must go through a parliamentary process. In this process, MPs can decide to increase or decrease the spending items proposed by the government. A budget only becomes a budget law when it is passed in the Bundestag. The spokesman emphasized to the Tagesspiegel that the government draft for 2022 amounted to 2.14 billion euros and that for 2023 is now estimated at 2.16 billion euros. These are figures that not only show an increase in funds, but also differ significantly from those given in the KNA report.
In recent years, there has always been only one direction for the federal government’s culture budget: namely, steeply upwards. The sums that the CDU politician Bernd Neumann and then his successor and party friend Monika Grütters were able to spend grew from household to household. While Claudia Roth now has to wait for the draft to become a budget law, she is already looking ahead to the Corona -Autumn and winter. In an interview with the magazine “Stern”, the Green politician emphasized: “Culture must not be treated again – as in the last pandemic years – like fitness clubs or brothels.” Culture is “systemically relevant” and “a staple food”, emphasized Roth and explained that she was already consulting with the responsible ministers at state level on what contribution the industry could make to saving energy so that its functionality would be maintained. In addition, it must now be a question of strengthening those cultural institutions that have so far been less frequented than before the pandemic. “We have to make it clear that with the appropriate precautionary measures, these are not the typical places for infection.” Therefore, uniform corona regulations are needed for all federal states before the start of autumn, as well as further aid and guarantees for the cultural sector.
