High prices for gasoline and diesel: Reiche only plans to cap fuel prices if there are high price jumps

Federal Minister of Economics Katherina Reiche (CDU) only wants to allow a fuel price cap in the event of extreme price increases and under high hurdles. This emerges from your ministry's draft bill for a maximum fuel price law, which is available to the Reuters news agency. According to preliminary planning, the cabinet should launch the draft on Wednesday. Accordingly, the government can only set maximum prices if fuel prices in Germany rise more than five percentage points more than the average for the other EU countries for three weeks in a row. This applies separately to petrol and diesel.

If prices rise similarly across Europe, a price cap would not be possible, even if there were significant price jumps in Germany. The Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed that the proposal was being voted on by the department. The ministry did not want to give details of the template, which was first reported by the “Handelsblatt”.

According to the draft, the federal government should be given the opportunity to set maximum prices for gasoline and diesel for a period of three months. The legal authorization should then expire automatically. According to an internal schedule available to Reuters, the Bundestag and Bundesrat should pass the proposed law before Christmas.

According to the draft, the data from the second full week of January should be taken into account for the price comparison for the first time. The basis should be the weekly fuel prices published by the EU Commission, excluding taxes and duties. The Federal Cartel Office is supposed to check weekly via its market transparency office whether the requirements for intervention are met. But even then the federal government would not necessarily have to introduce a price cap.

The draft provides for a regularly updated calculation formula for the maximum prices. Actual market conditions, import costs and appropriate trading and distribution margins must be taken into account. Maximum prices that are too low could lead to fuel deliveries to Germany becoming uneconomical and supply bottlenecks to arise. The federal government should therefore be able to suspend the price cap if there are impending supply problems.

The federal states should also be allowed to deviate upwards or downwards from national maximum prices in order to take regional differences in procurement and transport costs into account. This should also be possible for individual districts or postal code areas. Exceptions could also apply to certain gas stations, for example on motorways or on islands.

An excess profits tax for mineral oil companies called for by the SPD is rejected in the bill as an alternative to the fuel price cap. Such a tax cannot be designed to be legally secure in the short term, does not have an immediate relief effect for consumers and has a negative impact on investment incentives. A further temporary reduction in energy tax, the so-called fuel discount, is also out of the question due to the tense budget situation. (rtr)

In mid-September, at the urging of the Social Democrats, the coalition of the CDU, CSU and SPD agreed to introduce a fuel price cap from January 2027, if possible. This is intended to curb the high gas station prices as a result of the Iran War. The draft initially only creates a limited opportunity to intervene in the event of exceptional price increases. There is no specific relief in cents per liter.

Since October, a three-month reduction in energy tax on fuels has been in effect until the end of the year. Including the lower VAT, this results in a mathematical relief of around 17 cents per liter.