As announced on 30 November, Engel and Haagen will take over from their LSAP colleagues Dan Kersch and Romain Schneider. Their swearing-in ceremony takes place this Wednesday 5 January at the grand ducal palace, as well as that of Backes, who will succeed Pierre Gramegna (DP) at the ministry of finance.

Engel will become minister for sport and minister for labour. The role of deputy prime minister, occupied by Kersch, is being taken over by health minister Paulette Lenert (LSAP).

In the labour ministry, Engel will still have to deal with the consequences of the pandemic on companies. In its meeting of 13 December, the tripartite coordination committee--bringing together the government and employee and employer groups--notably retained the idea of extending until February the recovery aid and the aid for uncovered costs, as well as partial unemployment for vulnerable sectors whose activities remain directly impacted by pandemic restrictions.

Return of the “covid-19 tax”?

From 15 January, the CovidCheck and 3G scheme will also apply at work. Employees, civil servants and self-employed workers will only be able to access their workplace if they are vaccinated, recovered or have a professionally certified PCR or antigen test.

Engel will also have to decide whether to continue a debate launched by his predecessor: the “covid-19 tax”, a selective tax aimed at taxing the “winners of the crisis”. If prime minister Xavier Bettel (DP) had explained this summer that it would not be on the agenda before 2023, for LSAP president Yves Cruchten, “it is not on the back burner”, he recently told Delano’s sister publication Paperjam.

Green light for the velodrome

On the sports ministry side, there will be, among other things, the draft reform of sports leave, which has been adopted by the council of state. An athlete who qualifies for a European competition will be able to request 12 days of sports leave per year. Accompanying staff, coaches and physiotherapists will be able to benefit from 6 to 10 days of sports leave.

On 15 December, the government council also gave the green light to the project, which has been discussed several times in the past, to build a 27,000 square metre velodrome in Mondorf, near the football ground, for which the preliminary draft financing bill is estimated at €55m.

The introduction of third-party payment for Claude Haagen

Haagen, who on Wednesday becomes minister for agriculture and social security following the departure of Schneider, will also be in charge of several key dossiers between now and the end of the mandate. One of these is the issue of the CNS’s reserves, which are decreasing, from a level of over 30% of current expenditure in 2019 to 25.4% in 2020.

“At the end of 2022, there should still be reserves of €790m, which represents 20.8% of annual expenditure, and therefore still much more than the 10% required by law,” Schneider said last October. A specific working group dedicated to the search for new revenues has been set up within the framework of the Gesondheetsdësch, a round table devoted to the health system.

Another thorny issue is the deployment of direct payment, or third-party payment. This is one of the promises of the coalition agreement, and began last October with the launch of the first phase of digitalisation, namely the transfer of documents via a digital platform. This is a subject that has been the subject of much debate between the AMMD (Association of Medical and Dental Practitioners) and the eHealth Agency.

For agriculture, the government launched a scheme to increase organic farming to 20% of agriculture by 2025, up from around 4.5% in 2019, when the project was announced. But it faces criticism from environmental groups that it’s not doing enough to protect biodiversity, resulting in a at court over a campaign by activists. 

A new EU --a €386.6bn programme--meanwhile was voted into force in Brussels in December and it set to be implemented from 1 January 2023. 

Additional reporting by Cordula Schnuer

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.