Everybody wants to go to heaven. Nobody wants to die.
That is pretty much climate change policy, everywhere, in a nutshell. It is especially the position of liberal and conservative parties that, however begrudgingly, acknowledge that climate change is a) real, b) bad, and c) needs to be addressed, but geez does it really have to cost so much?
When those parties are part of a political system whose power derives foremost from the chemicals, automotive, and heavy machinery industries, the “but” becomes a particularly salient point. Never mind the cost of in- and insufficient action, which are much easier to ignore because status quo is much harder to see through.
Drop Germany’s new heating law into this environment. It finally passed at the end of last week after lumbering through the legislative process for much of the year. In that time the bill has become the distilled essence of a government coalition in seeming disarray. Imagine learning to tie your own shoes as a kid, feeling super proud of your little self for doing so, and when you show off your new skill to your parents, your mother shrugs and says, “They could be tighter.”
That was basically the liberal Free Democrats’ response to the Greens, when their philosopher-in-chief Robert Habeck, who runs the Economy and Climate Action Ministry, first presented the bill. The International Energy Agency says that heating of buildings accounts for around 10% of global carbon emissions, and this bill was going to start swapping out boilers that run on gas and oil with cleaner or more efficient means — namely, heat pumps, which essentially function like a refrigerator in reverse.
The FDP was quick to say nein. The party that claims it likes to move fast and break things said the plan was too fast and would break too much. They forced their coalition partners to compromise on some aspects, giving building owners and municipalities more time to figure out how to actually pay for and carry out this colossal energy transition. We are, after all, talking about every building in the country, starting with the new ones.
That’s when the Christian Democrats, in opposition, got in on the act, successfully suing to prevent a vote on the reworked bill before the Bundestag went off to enjoy yet another summer of record-breaking heat and “natural” disasters. In the interest of the democratic process, at least, they may have had a point. The government coalition spent so much time bickering over its bill internally that there may have been too little time to do the legislative due diligence before a vote.
Anyway, now the Bundestag is back and the thing has passed. It still needs to check a few more boxes, but the reform is more or less a done deal. Whether it survives the next government that might not be this one is an entirely different question.
As we have seen, the current coalition sucks. But, does it really? About halfway through its first term, the three-way “traffic light” is one of the least liked governments in the history of the postwar republic, and Germans are more pessimistic about their future than ever — even as they say life right now is kinda OK. As I observed long ago, in Germany it doesn’t matter if it’s sunny today when it might rain tomorrow.
The image of a feckless government in chaos, however, doesn’t really add up. An analysis by the Bertelsmann Stiftung this week reveals that two-thirds of the coalition’s policy initiatives have been fulfilled or are on their way to getting fulfilled. On the former point it is lower, as a percentage, than the previous, Merkel-led Grand Coalition at the same point in time, but in keeping with her style, they also promised a lot less.
Like, 50 percent less. In absolute numbers, the awkward, social-green-liberal coalition in power has made and made good on more promises than the boring but dependable, big-tent centrist one under Merkel. So there is a framing and perception problem here.
That’s what you get when you title your coalition agreement “dare more progress.” Add to that war, inflation, energy crisis, and an opposition that actually knows what it’s doing, and it isn’t difficult to see where the dissatisfaction lies. Olaf Scholz’s at times aloof tone and smug smirk are not helping matters.
So, if few care for the three parties in power, and the socialist Left has collapsed, dear voters are not left with many options. No wonder the conservative CDU is, nationally, looking great in polls and the far-right AfD even better in some states.
Most recently, it was Berlin’s sister state, Brandenburg, to make headlines with a poll showing 32 percent support for the far-right. That not only places it first, but puts it way out ahead of any other party, with the SPD and CDU coming in, respectively, at 20 and 18 percent.
Brandenburg still has a year until its next state election, which is an epoch in political time. The challenge will be, as we have already seen in places like Thuringia, putting together workable coalitions that keep the far-right out of power, as everyone has promised. There, a future marriage between socialists and conservatives is no longer unthinkable.
Good luck making all that work and getting anything done. If the spread between the AfD and other parties really is as dramatic as polls show, the math is going to get hard and, not to mention, undemocratic, by rejecting the electoral will of a lot of people in favor of less successful, but also less crazy, parties. If Germany needs to start saving democracy from itself, it risks a downward spiral of unstable and unsatisfying government coalitions playing even more into the hands of the far-right that claims they are the answer.
All of that matters at the national level, as I wrote about in a recent essay. As they say, watch this space. The space, that is, being between the Rhine and the Oder.
But it isn’t all bad news. A bunch of folks out of the conspiracy-theory, anti-republican, and ostensibly anti-Semitic Reichsbürger scene apparently have been quietly founding charitable nonprofits around Germany and calling them Jewish organizations. Oy, haven’t we suffered enough?
At last, the public media all German residents pay dearly for proves its worth with this delightful discovery. It’s unclear what the Reichsbürger motivations may be, but actual Jewish organizations say possibly as a front to hide their activities, which have come under the eye of domestic intelligence, collect donations, or try to get state support. Or should I say, get more state support, as links between right-wing groups like the Reichsbürger and authorities have already been well documented.
Some of these sketchy nonprofits have already been shut down, but not all of them, and it isn’t clear if anything illegal even happened. As the article notes, “the term ‘Jewish community’ is not legally protected. In the association register, there is generally no verification of whether there are actual Jewish institutions behind the associations.”
Given all the converts running or otherwise involved in “real” Jewish organizations in Germany, that must come as some relief. After all, the German state should not really be in the business of defining who is and is not a Jew.