Greens want Merkel to pump up budget spending

The leader of Germany’s surging Greens party, a likely coalition partner in any new government, raised the pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives to ditch their balanced budget goal and finance a climate protection plan with new debt.

The call by Robert Habeck comes after a senior government official said that the finance ministry, led by the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), is considering the issuance of new debt to help finance a costly climate protection programme that Berlin wants to seal next month.