The right and far-right are taking advantage of growing public concern about measures to climate change, promoted by the Greens. In an article on the Le Monde website, Thomas Wiede discusses latest happenings in German.
Germany’s backlash against environmental policies
It was Thursday, January 11. For the previous three days, German farmers had been taking action in the field against the government’s decision, announced three weeks earlier, to abolish the tax break on off-road diesel fuel. On that particular morning, as tractors blocked freeways across the country, one town made the front page: Cottbus, on the Polish border, where over 1,000 protesters had gathered, despite the polar cold, in front of the national rail company’s new maintenance workshop, which was due to be inaugurated by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
A few meters from the entrance, a man stood out, wearing a green vest and brown hat. This joyful 50-something seemed to know everyone, starting with the journalists from the regional press with whom he conducted one interview after another. Heiko Terno runs a 360-cow dairy farm between Cottbus and Berlin and is vice president of the Brandenburg Farmers’ Federation. When asked what he thinks of the government, his answer was blunt: “The big problem is the Greens. How could they be entrusted with the Ministry of Agriculture? These people know nothing about our problems. With the Social Democrats [SPD, Scholz’s party] or the Liberals [Finance Minister Christian Lindner’s party], we can disagree, but at least we talk. With the Greens, it’s impossible, we’re dealing with ideologues totally cut off from reality.”
Overhearing the political talk, an older man joined in the conversation. A retired textile worker, he wanted to be there to support the farmers. “For them, it’s the price of diesel, but for everyone else, it’s the same thing: We can’t buy anything anymore; in the last two years, all prices have exploded.” The culprits were quickly identified: Once again, it was the Greens. “We used to have cheap gas, but under the pretext that we were buying it from the evil Mr. Putin, they turned off the tap. We still had three nuclear power plants, but since they’ve decreed that nuclear power is worse than Satan, we shut them down just when we were facing an electricity shortage. These people tell us they want to save the planet, but in the meantime, they’re ruining Germany and starving the Germans.”
The words were harsh, but they reflected the zeitgeist. At the beginning of 2021, the think tank More in Common and the polling institute Kantar asked a representative sample of the German population the question “Do you support the societal movement to protect the environment and combat climate change?” At the time, 68% of respondents answered yes. Two years later, in May 2023, only 34% of those polled answered positively to the same question.
Gas tax
How can such a reversal of public opinion be explained? Clearly, mistakes have been made over the past two years by those who embody the fight for environmental and climate protection, starting with the Greens. Since their return to the federal government in December 2021, there have been two phases. In the first, their president, Robert Habeck, now vice chancellor and economy and climate minister, was extremely pragmatic, going so far as to negotiate a liquefied natural gas supply contract with Qatar to compensate for the halt in Russian gas deliveries. For an environmentalist, even one who belongs to the “Realos” (moderates), this was not a matter of course.
At the time, there was some grumbling among the more hard-line Greens, but the Germans approved: Six months after joining the government, Habeck was the country’s most popular minister, well ahead of Scholz, according to ZDF’s monthly poll. Today, he’s the most hated.
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Things started to go downhill in August 2022. In proposing a gas tax to guarantee the stability of Germany’s energy system in the face of falling Russian gas supplies, Habeck did not anticipate the public outcry such an announcement would arouse, with the measure representing an additional annual cost of several hundred euros per household. Faced with the onset of civil unrest, the government abandoned the tax and hastily drew up a €200 billion anti-inflation measure. But at the beginning of 2023, a new plan aroused public interest: the bill to renovate heating systems, also sponsored by Habeck.
The ‘climate dictatorship’
After months of heated discussions, the minister acknowledged that this bill – which stipulates that all new heating installed from 2024 onwards must use more than 65% renewable energy – was “the last straw in terms of legislation.” Politically, there was a before and an after. On the defensive since the invasion of Ukraine because of its proximity to Russia, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has taken advantage of the concerns aroused by the “heating law” in public opinion to reinvent its image by presenting itself as the guarantor of “freedom” in the face of the “climate dictatorship.”
Already in 2019, its president, Alexander Gauland, named “the fight against climate policies” as the “third major important theme for the AfD after the fights against the euro and immigration.” But at the time, the party had little voice in this area. Four years later, with the Greens in government and against a backdrop of soaring energy prices, public opinion has become much more receptive.
When it comes to greenbashing, however, the AfD is far from having a monopoly. In this field, the evolution of the right has been dramatic. After his victory in the 2018 Bavarian regional elections, Markus Söder, president of the conservative CSU (Christian Social Union in Bavaria, center right), stunned everyone by endorsing an environmentalist petition to save bees. On the eve of the 2021 legislative elections, he also surprised everyone by declaring himself in favor of a coalition bringing together conservatives and “reasonable” Greens.
Two years later, he has completely changed his tune. Campaigning for re-election as the leader of Bavaria in 2023, Söder hammered home the point that the Greens did not belong in his region’s “DNA,” that they “had as little place in Bavaria as chamomile tea at Oktoberfest” and that he would do everything in his power to block this “party of prohibition,” not hesitating to crudely caricature it by accusing it of “wanting to impose vegetarianism and gender theory.”
‘Cultural battle’
Even the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), more moderate than Bavaria’s CSU, has followed suit. Here too, a milestone was reached with the debate on the “heating law,” during which CDU president Friedrich Merz singled out the Greens as his “main adversaries.” Although some party leaders disagreed, believing that their leader had lost sight of the priority battle against the far-right, there was indeed a break between the Christian Democrats and the Greens, in contrast to the rapprochement that had taken place during Angela Merkel’s 18-year presidency of the CDU (2000-2018).
The most spectacular symbol is the choice made in November 2023 by the minister-president of Hesse, Boris Rhein (CDU), not to renew his coalition with the Greens, despite being among the most centrist in the country, preferring to ally with the SPD. The SPD was considered less demanding on the front of the fight against global warming and more inclined to follow him in his battle against insecurity.
“Today, there’s a right-wing bloc – whose hard core is the AfD, but which includes the CDU-CSU and even the FDP [Free Democratic Party, center right], even though they’re in government – engaged in a merciless cultural battle against issues that the Greens are the only ones to really promote in the German political debate, starting with the environmental transition,” said Claus Leggewie, professor of political science at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. “Insofar as neither the SPD nor the chancellor, who are discreet if not non-existent, are heard, it is the Greens, starting with their main minister, Robert Habeck, who embody the progressive side in the cultural battle being waged by the authoritarian right.”
This cultural battle – which, unlike for the SPD and FDP, is not reflected in the Greens’ collapse in voting intentions – is not limited to words. According to figures released by the government a few weeks ago, 739 assaults were committed against elected representatives in the first half of 2023, including 301 against Greens, by far the most targeted party ahead of the SPD (153) and AfD (151). As for attacks on the offices or permanent residences of elected representatives, 279 were recorded over the same period in Germany, including 179 against the Greens, again far more than against the SPD (58) or the AfD (38).
The figures for the second half of 2023 have not yet been released, but the campaign in Bavaria for the regional elections was a reminder that the tension has not subsided: On September 20, 2023, the two lead Green candidates in the region, Katharina Schulze and Ludwig Hartmann, were targeted by a stone that passed very close to them during a rally in Neu-Ulm. In recent months, several party leaders have been provided tight security.
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