The headlines were stark. The elections in Berlin represent, as Politico put it: “The end of Germany’s climate crusade”. Time magazine said the repercussions would ripple far and wide, with “huge stakes for climate action around the world”.
Olaf Scholz, the defeated Germany chancellor, had led a coalition government with one of the most ambitious climate policies in the world. He had set out to achieve “climate neutrality” by 2045 – five years ahead of Britain’s net zero target, with exacting targets for rolling out electric cars and heat pumps.
But with the German economy struggling, his opponents used Scholz’s climate policy as a punching bag. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the winner of the election, posted on social media before the vote that the economic ministry would be led by “someone who understands that economic policy is more than being a representative for heat pumps”. While on the campaign trail, Merz said that the German economic policy of recent years had been geared “almost exclusively toward climate protection,” adding: “I want to say it clearly as I mean it: We will and we must change that.”
Scholz and his Social Democratic Party (SPD) achieved just 16 per cent of the vote, nine points down on the last election. Its coalition partners were also punished. The Greens dropped three points to less than 12 per cent of the vote, and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) seven points to four per cent of the vote. The right-wing climate-sceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), meanwhile, surged into second place with 21 per cent.
So what now? The Times’ Berlin correspondent Oliver Moody describes Merz as a “diametric opposite” to his cautious predecessors Scholz and Angela Merkel: “a gambler and provocateur with a palpable delight in the cut and thrust of debate”. The incoming chancellor, who is likely to form a government with the battered SPD – minus Scholz, of course – is, says Moody, “an unreconstructed alpha male with a taste for theatrics and disruption”.
So far it is all sounding a bit Donald Trump. But there are differences. Merz may have won the election on an anti-green campaign, but the results were hardly a resounding vote for his policies. The CDU received less than 29 per cent of the vote, its second worst result in its history. As Moody put it, Merz won “not on a wave of public enthusiasm but simply by dint of being the least unpopular candidate in an exceptionally unpopular field”. And this was not just about climate – the economy and immigration played a far bigger role. Merz may even be forced to bring the Greens into a coalition in order to form a government. As Clean Energy Wire puts it, “climate and energy policies in Germany are unlikely to see a substantial shift in key areas under the most likely coalition scenarios”.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the German election is part of a worldwide backlash against green policies. Recent elections in Austria, Belgium, Ireland and of course the US have seen incumbents with progressive climate policies booted out of government.
Britain’s Labour party – which has made decarbonisation of the power system a central pillar of its agenda – does not have to face the electorate again until 2029. By then, if it wants a second term, it must work out how to make these policies into a vote winner.
