Social benefits for eu citizens: when germans burden foreign countries
How will the ECJ rule on Hartz IV for Romanians and Bulgarians? A ruling on a pensioner living in Austria provides clues.

Always good for a snappy remark: session room of the ECJ. Picture: dpa
For weeks, Germany has been discussing poverty immigration from Romania and Bulgaria. The CSU wants to restrict social benefits for EU citizens and thus reduce the incentives to come to Germany. In doing so, the CSU does not take EU law into consideration. The discussion at the legal level tends to go in the other direction. There, already existing German benefit exclusions for EU citizens are controversial.