GERMANY: Christmas came early for gay German couples yesterday after it emerged that their inferior status before the law has left them immune to tough social welfare reforms in the new year.
The sweeping reforms, known as Hartz IV, will combine dole and social welfare payments from January. Payment levels will also depend on a means test that will take into account the income and value of property owned by the social welfare recipient's partner.
A recipient's social welfare payments may in future be stopped if the authorities decide, based on income tables, the partner's net worth is adequate for both.
However, a loophole for homosexual couples has emerged because German law defines as a partner either a spouse in a traditional marriage or a co-habiting heterosexual partner.
German politicians and courts have until now staunchly defended this position and have resisted expanding the definition of partner to same-sex couples.
A law introduced in Germany three years ago allows same-sex couples to register their partnership at the local town hall. However, pressure from conservatives and the Catholic Church meant the government stopped short of giving registered gay couples the same tax benefits of heterosexual married couples.
Deprived of those financial incentives, many couples have not bothered to register their partnerships.
But what was previously a minus for gay couples could turn into a plus on January 1st.
"If homosexuals live together without registering their partnership, then the property and income of a partner will not be taken into account," confirmed Mr Ulrich Waschki, spokesman for the Federal Employment Agency to a Sunday newspaper yesterday.
German politicians were apoplectic at the news.
Mr Rainer Wend, the Social Democratic (SPD) head of the Bundestag economic committee, said: "It must be clear that homosexual partnerships aren't treated any differently to heterosexual."
Off the record, government sources in Berlin yesterday admitted the situation had a certain irony: that policies to limit the rights and recognition of gay couples could now financially benefit those same couples.
But Germany's conservatives aren't laughing. "It cannot be that homosexual couples will be given preferential treatment," said Mr Johannes Singhammer, employment market spokesman of Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU). A government spokesman said a last-minute revision of the law was possible but unlikely.