FRANKFURT, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- Around 80 percent of the long-distance trains have been put to a standstill from Wednesday through Friday in Germany as the train drivers of the state-owned railway company Deutsche Bahn went on strike to get reduced working hours and better pay.
Twelve days into the first month of 2024, the train drivers' protest is one of a spate of strikes in the largest economy in the European Union (EU), which is grappling to find a way back to economic growth.
On Jan. 4, German Deputy Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck and his wife found themselves trapped by some 300 farmers when they were trying to disembark from a ferry off the northern coast.
The farmers, who were exasperated that the diesel subsidies would be curtailed under the government's policies, refused to talk to Habeck.
Four days later, German farmers started a week of nationwide protests, marked by thousands of trucks and tractors blocking streets and highways, even though the federal government backtracked on a proposal it put forward at the end of 2023 to end the tax break for the purchase of farming and forestry equipment and agricultural diesel subsidies after the Constitutional Court's budget ruling.
On Nov. 15, the Constitutional Court in the city of Karlsruhe ruled against the federal government's plan to reallocate 60 billion euros (65.79 billion U.S. dollars) that was unused in the pandemic support fund to the Climate and Transformation Fund (CTF), causing a gap in the country's budgets.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the ruling would have significant consequences for the government's efforts to decarbonize the economy.
"There are significant constraints for federal budgets in coming years in terms of spending on government support for decarbonization," Clemens Fuest, president of think tank Ifo Institute, commented on the ruling.
The budget gap will inevitably hamper the federal government's effort to galvanize the economy through subsidies and other forms of government spending at a time when inflation remains stubbornly high and global demand weak.
A forecast from Ifo Institute showed that the German economy could shrink by 0.6 percent in 2023, making it one of the worst performers in the EU.
Germany's industrial production in November 2023 dropped by 0.7 percent month on month and 4.8 percent over the same period in 2022, according to the Federal Statistical Office.
According to a study published by the European Commission in November, Germany's GDP is expected to contract by 0.3 percent in 2023 as high inflation erodes purchasing power and tightened financing conditions are weighing on consumption and investment. Foreign demand, on which the German economy is heavily dependent, has "evolved less favorably than previously assumed."
