Federal budgets run a ‘black zero’ surplus path

From 2014 federal budgets under Schäuble and then Scholz ran without new net borrowing, the schwarze Null. Public investment lagged. The surplus path is a completed fiscal stance of her later terms.

Context

Germany's schwarze Null ("black zero") was a political shorthand for balancing the federal budget without net new borrowing. It became especially associated with the finance ministry under Wolfgang Schäuble and the Merkel government. In November 2014, the federal government described the Bundestag's 2015 budget as a budget without new debt and said it would be the first such federal budget since 1969. This is a fiscal-policy choice, not a synonym for Germany's constitutional debt brake: the debt brake is a legal fiscal rule, while schwarze Null describes the stronger political objective of avoiding new federal borrowing altogether. Source: German Federal Government, 28 November 2014 (opens in a new tab).

Record

The policy moved from target to reported outcome. Germany's public broadcaster Tagesschau reported in January 2015 that the federal government had already closed 2014 without taking on new debt, a year earlier than the formal 2015 target, and described that as the first such result since 1969. The balanced-budget stance continued through a period of strong revenues and low financing costs. By 2019, the IMF recorded a fifth consecutive general-government surplus for 2018. That sequence matters because it separates the political slogan from a single one-year accounting event: schwarze Null became a repeated governing constraint and reference point in budget debates. Sources: Tagesschau, 13 January 2015 (opens in a new tab) and IMF, 10 July 2019 (opens in a new tab).