Have cracks started to show in Germany’s traffic light government? Less than 18 months after chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SDP) formed a coalition with the Green and Federal Democratic (FDP) parties, collaboration and harmony have been replaced by division – not least when it comes to the push for net zero.
Scholz summoned his coalition partners to a three-day summit last week. Their mission? To hash out policy differences that had been hanging over the government for several months. Emerging from 30 hours of negotiations, however, the SDP, FDP and Greens seem further apart than ever.
The main point of contention for the three parties is, perhaps surprisingly, the environment. Going into the summit, much was riding on the Greens’ ability to win policy concessions that would satisfy their membership. Environmental policies, which could be considered small wins, were indeed hammered out: investment worth several billion euros has been agreed for Germany’s rail network and domestic oil and gas heaters will be phased out of the country from next year. But that was about it.
The warning signs over Germany’s shifting attitude towards the environment have existed for a while
These relatively modest triumphs have been dwarfed by the other decisions made at the summit which threaten to counteract any environmental good they could do. In a victory for the liberal FDP, 144 projects aimed at expanding Germany’s motorway network will be fast-tracked due to ‘overriding public interest’. Sector-specific CO2 reduction targets will be scrapped at the insistence of the centre-left SDP, to be replaced with one national target.
At the press conference announcing the results of the negotiations, Scholz did his best to strike an optimistic tone. The summit, he said, had yielded ‘very, very, very good results’. His repetition of ‘very’ did little to convince anyone.
Sure enough, hours after the talks had concluded, the Greens began making their displeasure clear. The policies agreed ‘didn’t go far enough’, they said. In a catty swipe, the party’s leader Ricarda Lang said she wished ‘all three traffic light partners felt a special responsibility for climate protection’. On 3 April, the party went on the record to dispute the FDP finance minister Christian Lindner’s assertion that little government aid would be available to help households change over their heating systems. Green party politician Andreas Audretsch pledged a programme worth ‘billions’ so that ‘no one is overwhelmed by the costs’.
Overwhelmingly, the Green party emerged weakest from the coalition summit. But was the Greens’ failure to secure any full-throated environmental victories a symptom of something bigger altogether?
The warning signs over Germany’s shifting attitude towards the environment have existed for a while. Despite committing to net zero by 2045, in November, Berlin signed a deal with Qatar to buy two million tonnes of gas annually for a 15-year period, starting from 2026. Last month, Germany, spearheaded by the FDP’s federal transport minister Volker Wissing, held up a plan by the EU to ban combustion engines in cars by 2035 until concessions for so-called ‘e-fuels’ were carved out.
The FPD is positioning itself as the Greens’ ideological opposite, viewing any demands they make for environmental policies as fair game for a fight. But why are they making environmental policies a target? Simply put, the countdown to Germany’s next federal election, due to be held by October 2025, is looming. With their ratings struggling to climb above 7 per cent, the signs point to the party’s attempt to harness the environment as the vehicle for a new culture war.
Not helping the Green party’s struggle to champion any serious environmental policies is the fact that Germans seem to be losing their passion for the green agenda. According to research conducted in March, just a quarter of Germans supported the EU’s plan to ban combustion engines in cars; 67 per cent actively opposed it.
A survey by the newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that half of its respondents don’t consider concerns over the environment a priority at the moment, with issues such as energy prices and cost of living holding more importance. Post-pandemic economic recovery, as well as concerns over the war in Ukraine and energy security also appear to have eaten away at Germans’ desires to tackle the climate crisis.
All this makes it seem that the Green Party are playing a losing game in German politics. But they are not the only party losing out.
With increasing polarisation between the Greens and FDP, Scholz’s SDP is trying to straddle a growing gulf in the coalition that is damaging their own credibility. Scholz, himself, has not escaped the ire of his party – having campaigned on a ticket as the ‘climate Chancellor’ in 2021, many of his supporters see his failure to support the Greens’ proposals at best as flip-flopping, or, at worst, a betrayal.
Further arguments are already brewing for Germany’s traffic light coalition. On 15 April, the last three of the country’s nuclear power stations are set to be retired following an extension due to the war in Ukraine. The FDP is calling for their closure to be postponed again, calling the decision to close them a ‘strategic mistake’. Germany, they say, would be missing out on cheaper energy prices as a result at a time when the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine is still being felt. Without the government aid the Greens have been calling for, as many as 12.5 per cent of Germany’s adult population will struggle to replace their heating systems when the time comes.
As the Greens increasingly view themselves as the last bastion of climate protection, the FDP are leaning heavily the other way to try and save their polling figures. Meanwhile, the SDP are doing little to lead from the front. The traffic light coalition – and Germany’s radical environmental ambitions – are on borrowed time.
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