The cities and the federal government will not come together anytime soon. There is no lasting consensus in sight on the thirty-year-old issue of migration that could do justice to immigration that has fluctuated sharply for years. It can still be assumed that cities will be able to cope with the next decades of transformation to a climate-neutral community as unbureaucratically and well-equipped as they would like. At the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Cities in Cologne, Olaf Scholz and the local politicians talked past each other, even if they nodded to each other in a friendly manner.

Is the federal government doing its part?

Scholz's repeated remark that "the federal government is doing its part" showed where he currently sees the limits of what is possible. This government is unlikely to muster the strength to lay a financial foundation that will revive local self-government in terms of climate policy. If the federal government had listened to the municipalities, it would have been spared a lot of heat turnaround.

The first step would have been to lay the foundations for the expansion of municipal heating networks, and only the second would have been the requirements for private households. Instead, Robert Habeck and Klara Geywitz put the cart before the horse. Is the federal government doing its part? Municipalities and citizens currently have only sarcasm left.