Götterdämmerung of German Greens?

In November 1981, popular German magazine ´Spiegel´ broke a cover story on the “dying forests” phenomenon, a serious and irreversible threat to Central Europe´s forests. A small group of scientists had built a convincing narrative on the waldsterben. They claimed that exhaust fumes from factories in large industrial clusters like Germany´s Ruhrgebiet, and in former Czechoslovakia, released large quantities of sulphur into the atmosphere. It combined with oxygen and solved into cloud droplets in the air to create an acidic liquid. That acidic liquid eventually washed out as rain – acid rain, which killed the roots of trees and caused whole forests to die.

“The first large forests will die already in the next five years. They cannot be saved.“

(forest scientist Bernhard Ulrich, 1981)

Mass media picked up on the topic. By 1983, coverage on dying forests and acid rain appeared almost daily and brought images of dead forests into every household in the German speaking countries. The tone of media coverage during the early 1980s was alarmist and emotional. They presented acid rain and dying forests as undeniable facts. Large parts of the population became convinced that ten years hence, most forests in Central Europe would be dead.

(Dead trees at Bayerischer Wald, Bavaria, Germany)

Dying forests became a major topic in parliamentary elections in 1983 in Germany and enabled the Green party to enter the German parliament. In 1984, the German government sent tree seeds to every German household – the message being, to compensate the loss of forests, new trees had to be planted by every single citizen. In 1985, the German postal services issued a special edition stamp depicting a watch showing the time as „3 minutes to twelve“.

The waldsterben angst hit fertile ground. Large parts of the German population have a sentimental attachment to forests. The German fairytales mostly take place in forests, and Germans are known for their outdoors enthusiasm. And the population was already unnerved by the political climate during that time. The escalating cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union reached its second and more fearsome peak in the 1980s. There was little doubt that Germany was going to be ground zero in an open confrontation. A few years before, the TV movie “The Day After” had driven home the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war with its disturbing imagery.

And then came April 1986.

On Monday, April 28, 1986, automated sensors at the Swedish nuclear power plant Forsmark, situated on the Baltic Sea across Finland, detected increased levels of radioactive load in the air around the station and triggered an alarm. Engineers immediately performed tests on the workwear of employees at the station and confirmed the increased load.

However, on the operating level everything seemed fine at Forsmark, and safety checks found no radiation leaks. No other potential sources of radioactive material were in the proximity. The engineers consulted meteorological maps and noted that under the prevailing conditions, air arrived in Sweden from the Southeast. The engineers realized something must have gone wrong in Russia or another Soviet country.

Three days before, on April 25, operating crews at a Ukrainian nuclear power plant started working on a test shutdown of power block 4. The site of the plant, called Chernobyl, was located about 100km north of Kiev, close to the border of Belarus, another Soviet country.

Block 4 was the only reactor at the plant which had not undergone initial test procedures after its construction, due to the pressure to go onstream as soon as possible. In April 1986, plant managers finally wanted to make up for that lapse. A few hours into the complicated process to shut down the reactor, another Ukrainian power plant experienced an unexpected power loss. Chernobyl received instructions to keep block 4 running at its low output.

The unplanned delay broke the test protocol. The operating crews switched from dayshift, whose engineers had fully laid out the test, to the uninitiated nightshift. A whole zoo of intermediate chemical elements formed in incomplete reactions as the reactor idled for hours below minimum load. The delay triggered a sequence of actions and decisions which together resulted in the worst nuclear accident in history¹.

After two explosions, one of them blowing up block 4, the second one the roof of the plant, at 1:30 AM on April 26 the reactor core lay open to the atmosphere. Radioactive fallout escaped and was transported by an eastern breeze to western Europe. Among the countries there, Austria and Western Germany were most exposed to contamination.

(Source: ZAMG (Zentralanstalt fuer Meteorologie und Geodynamik), the Austrian national meteorological service)

Waldsterben and the Chernobyl accident were among the key formative experiences of the generation in the 1980s in Germany and Austria, and those experiences imbedded a deep concern for the environment into the DNA of the larger population.

The Green party flourished especially among the younger generations, and it had a firm foothold in the German parliament. The influence of the Greens was much larger than their vote in elections, as their core believes were shared broadly in the population irrespective of political leanings. Those beliefs launched a new trajectory of politics over many decades.

As the new millennium broke, the generation of the 1980s progressed to senior stages in their career development. They became leaders in corporations, politics, and in the media.

Their decisions became more pivotal for the development of Germany.

The explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after a seaquake on March 11, 2011, immediately reignited the fears of nuclear power. In April 2011, German chancellor Angela Merkel declared the government´s decision to shut down all of Germany´s nuclear power plants over the next few years.

For its energy infrastructure, Germany had a huge ace up its sleeves. Construction on a big gas pipeline was nearing completion, connecting Germany with some of the world’s largest gas fields. It was going to supply enormous quantities of cheap natural gas to Germany. The pipeline, called Nord Stream, started in Vyborg, a Russian city between St. Petersburg and the Finnish border, crossed the Baltic Sea, and ended at a terminal at Greifswald in northern Germany. Nord Stream was inaugurated in November 2011. Shutting down nuclear plants wasn´t going to have any implications on German energy supply.

However it did change the power dynamics in Europe. The United States watched with unease as Russia´s influence in Europe was growing. The U.S. was afraid that Russia would gain too much leverage over Germany. The CEO of Nord Stream was no other than Gerhard Schröder, Germany´s chancellor in 1998-2005 in a coalition government of the Social Democrats and the Green party. Schröder became something like best buddies with Russia´s Vladimir Putin, and he continually pushed to expand the energy connex with a second gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2.

The Green party meanwhile moved from success to success. After the energy sector it confidently took on Germany´s car industry, launching an unending wave of lawsuits on the violation of emission testing protocols.

To speed up the transition away from carbon-heavy coal and oil, Germany authorized the second gas pipeline, essentially parallel to the existing one. Offshore construction began in 2018 and finished in 2019. Natural gas had become the most important energy source for German industry (31.2% in 2020) and for households (41.2% in 2019)².

Russia already supplied about half of Germany´s consumption. Nord Stream 2 was potentially going to double the imports of Russian gas, cementing the monopolistic and dominating role of Russia, and deepening Germany´s dependency. German politicians underestimated with how much anxiety the power shift was viewed from the outside. The stratagem had become unacceptable for the United States, and leading politicans including U.S. President Joe Biden and Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, openly said that Nord Stream 2 was not going to go onstream, one way or the other.

Peak Momentum

In general elections in 2021, the Green party reached 14.8%, winning almost 6 percentage points. The result put them back into a coalition government with the Social Democrats and Germany´s liberal party FDP (free democratic party). Party co-head Robert Habeck became vice chancellor and minister for the economy and climate protection.

After hibernating during the pandemic, global warming returned to the green agenda with a vengeance. But for the first time, the environment was changing. Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine, and western countries imposed layer after layer of economic sanctions on Russia. Germany was in a limbo about natural gas. If it cut ties with Russia, how would it compensate Russian gas?

Energy prices skyrocketed. Household heating bills doubled and tripled. When mysterious explosions destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022, and gas inventories in Germany depleted rapidly, fear spread in the population if there would be any gas at all to last Germany through the winter, irrespective of price.

Undaunted, Habeck pushed further an ambitious new regulation for home heating systems. The bureaucratic monster will require at least 65% of heating energy for new homes to come from renewable sources from 2024. Construction companies and home builders balked at the new increase in costs. Habeck realized the government had to adjust the new law to make it palatable, and set up a schedule of government subsidies for the transition of household heating. Funds would come from the “Klima- und Transformationsfonds”. But how would that fund cope with the new and unexpected transfers?

German chancellor Oliver Scholz remembered there was an unused economic relief fund from the COVID era, worth 60 billion euros. With the approval of finance minister Lindner, they added the program to their Climate and Transition Fund as funding. This time however, the realities of a legal system and responsible budget controls caught up with the Green party. The German Federal Constitutional Court ruled in November 2023 that the funding was an illegal violation of debt ceilings.

The ruling was a shock for the government. Not only didn´t it have an approved budget for 2023, which was a huge problem in itself. It was also completely unclear how it could fund the subsidies it promised for decarbonization initiatives.

Has judgment day arrived for the Green party?

The deeper problem for the Green party is that finally economic realities are catching up with them. In the past, it never had to face the consequences of its decisions. They made industry pay (in court cases against the car producers); the “rich” (taxes); the Americans (defense); the French (nuclear energy); the Russians (gas). But with the energy strategy, Germany has put itself into a corner, and Germans are feeling the pain as they pay thousands of Euros extra for their energy bills. Larger parts of the population start realizing that actions have consequences. If Germany wants decarbonization, it will have to put the money on the table.

Not only on the individual household level but also at the Federal level, Germany is facing its biggest budget crisis since the Federal Republic came into existence. The freehanded back-and-forth shuffling of billion-dollar funds is not only a sign of carelessness or incompetence, it also reflects an attitude which is fundamentally un-German. Previous finance ministers like Wolfgang Schäuble had an iron grip on spending. German government debt is just 66% of GDP, after covid, and after the GFC, half the amount of the U.S.

It´s very difficult to find another large country in which environmental concerns are hardwired into the brains of large parts of the population as deeply as in Germany. But traditional centrist parties have taken over environmental programs. Surveys in the population in recent weeks³ have produced disastrous results for the government and the Green coalition faction. The Greens came out at just 12%, the lowest level in more than five years. Overall the government reached 34%, or 18 percentage points less than at general elections of 2018. The coalition has lost more than half of its voters.

Fault lines are already forming at the party, often pitting the idealistic but dogmatic party youth against more experienced leaders on topics like migration. At the most recent annual convention, the Green Youth, the party´s succession organization, had a severe clash with party heads. Leaders of the Last Generation, an organization sponsored by the Greens, have left it, or are planning to leave.

Markus Söder, the powerful leader of Bavaria´s CSU, a surprise winner in recent state elections in which all the coalition parties lost seats, is already calling for a general election.

Ideology or economics – the Green party will have to make monumental decisions about its core beliefs.

1. Today it’s widely recognized that many of those actions and decisions could have been reversed, breaking the fatal trajectory. That they were not reflects an appalling lack of safety culture at the operators of the plant.

2. DESTATIS, Statistisches Bundesamt, Pressemitteilung Nr. N044

3. INSA Meinungsforschungsinstitut, Sunday survey, Nov 26, 2023