Time to Help the West?

As Germany's federal and state family ministers gathered Monday to discuss plans to set aside more money for child day care, one of them said that it was finally time to focus on that part of the country that's been disadvantaged for far too long: the West.

"If the East is ahead of the West in this respect, the money should go where it's needed," Family Minister Armin Laschet, a conservative from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told n-tv.

Laschet's comment is just the latest in a rekindled debate about the continuing financial support Germany's eastern states receive from their western neighbors. It comes just after a government minister announced over the weekend that the former communist part of the country is growing faster than the rest.

Booming East?

"It's a turning point in eastern Germany's economic development," said Wolfgang Tiefensee, the federal minister in charge of eastern German reconstruction. While the so-called "new states" were expected to experience growth of 4.5 percent during the second quarter of 2007, estimates for Germany as a whole came to just 2.1 percent, he added.

But Tiefensee, a Social Democrat, also said that eastern Germany continued to suffer from decades of communist mismanagement: It continues to have the highest number of long-term unemployed people and still requires ongoing financial help from the western states to improve.

Many Westerners, however, who have long been resentful because of these so-called "solidarity pact" payments, are questioning whether it's fair to continue to give money to eastern regions while some in the west are struggling even harder.

Struggling in the West

"Sixteen years after reunification, we finally have to stop handing out help according to cardinal direction rather than need," Hannelore Kraft, the leader of North Rhine-Westphalia's opposition Social Democrats, told Germany's Bild am Sonntag (BamS) tabloid.

Kraft added that it wasn't fair to keep giving the debt-free eastern German city of Dresden 300 million euros ($400 million) while cities in her state's Ruhr region could no longer afford kindergartens and still had to send money to the East.

Shifting help

Tiefensee, who has proposed establishing an "investment pact" to aid struggling regions, said that western problem areas will have to receive more attention in the future. Some 56 million euros originally earmarked for eastern Germany have already been reallocated to do just that, he added.

"In the East, there are a few cities and regions that can keep up and that have to drag along their surroundings," Tiefensee told BamS. "In the West it's the reverse situation: Next to many prosperous cities and regions there are a few that are falling behind. That's where we need to help."