HAMBURG, Germany German truckers and farmers staged a series of protests at high oil prices on Tuesday, holding up traffic, but there was little sign the government was about to yield to demands for cuts in fuel duty.
Police said about 300 trucks, taxis and buses, blowing their horns in unison, rode around Hamburg's inner ring road in the latest in a series of actions across the country in the past week that have coincided with protests elsewhere in Europe.
"We Will Not Allow Ourselves to Be Taxed Into the Abyss," read one slogan on a truck in the northern port city.
About 170 trucks slowed traffic on three busy motorways leading to the western town of Wiesbaden, police said. They planned to bring a note of protest to the regional economics minister in the town, the capital of Hesse State.
The trucks, traveling side-by-side at a crawl, caused long lines of traffic to snake behind them in all the lanes.
One of the slow moving convoys, stretching four kilometers (three miles), slowed traffic to nearby Frankfurt Airport, continental Europe's busiest hub. Traffic stretched for several kilometers (miles) behind.
Hamburg taxi driver Monika Borchers, 47, said: "Higher petrol prices are a slap in the face for us. We can't take it any longer." In the northwestern town of Unna, farmers with 170 modern green tractors blocked the main street.
Rather than completely stop traffic as protesters in France and some other European countries have done, German truckers have sought to keep moving, albeit slowly, to comply with strict laws that render unauthorized demonstrators liable to hefty claims for compensation from disrupted businesses.
Price Pressure Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government has come under intense pressure to scrap its plans to raise petrol taxes in January, the latest installment in a five-part scheme to raise duties on polluting fuels as a way of helping the environment.
It has refused, saying the six-pfennig (2.6-cent) tax increase will be used to reduce pension insurance contributions.
It has so far put off a decision on offering tax relief for hardship cases caused by soaring oil prices, averting possible friction in the center-left alliance.
Bundesbank President Ernst Welteke criticized European governments offering tax concessions over high oil prices.
"It is not very sensible to react with tax cuts in such a situation," Welteke told a news conference.
Schroeder's Social Democrats have suggested helping low-income groups like pensioners pay heating oil bills and raising tax breaks for people who drive to work to ease the pain caused by crude oil prices at 10-year highs.
But his environmentalist Greens partners architects of an unpopular strategy to ratchet up energy taxes balked at the proposals and said they wanted breaks for those riding bicycles and taking public transport as well.
"Various proposals are under discussion," Green Party member Christine Scheel, chairwoman of Parliament's Lower House, told WDR radio on Tuesday. Tax breaks just for drivers "benefit those with higher incomes more." Transport Minister Reinhard Klimmt said he was seeking a meeting with representatives of transport companies later on Tuesday.
(Reuter)