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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/12/why-germany-greens-switching-election-focus-from-climate>
"The crowd had crammed into a concert hall in central Berlin to hear
crunch-time election pitches from Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, the
high-profile Green ministers in charge of Germany’s economy and diplomacy. But
to the surprise of some supporters, it took half an hour for anyone in the
environment-rooted party to mention the climate.
Germany’s Greens are fighting to hold on to power after four years in a
coalition government where they have been pilloried by other parties, and
during which their core issue of climate action has slipped down the political
agenda. Though the party is still far from being considered a
Volkspartei – a
main party whose voters span demographic groups and issues – the Greens have
sought to boost their mainstream appeal with talk of beefing up security and
bringing down rents and bills.
“Electricity has become green,” an animated Habeck told the crowd, pointing to
a boom in wind and solar that raised the share of renewables to 60% last year.
“Now we’re making it cheap.”
The odds of a Green surge when Germans head to the polls next Sunday are by
some measures slim. Governing parties of all stripes have had a disastrous year
at the ballot box, losing votes in almost every democracy that held elections,
and the Green parties that made it into coalition governments in Ireland,
Austria and Belgium all shed seats. Heavy losses in Germany and France drove a
continent-wide setback at the European parliamentary elections in June.
But in Germany, the sixth-biggest historical polluter of planet-heating gas,
the Greens have also shouldered the blame for the country’s economic woes – and
become a target of ridicule for other politicians. Their market-liberal former
coalition partners, the centre-right opposition and an emboldened far-right
have held them responsible for Germany’s “deindustrialisation”. A clean-heating
law, introduced by Habeck in 2023, proved particularly unpopular with the
public.
“What’s happened in the last years is that the far-right has identified the
climate as a target – partly, honestly, because climate politics was quite
successful,” said Luisa Neubauer, Germany’s best-known activist from the
Fridays for Future school strike movement. “There wasn’t a climate revolution
in Germany, but things got going, and that turned it into a threat for
basically any party other than the Greens.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
