Shortly before the last federal election in 2021, a few years after I had moved to Germany, I watched a TV debate that put climate at the forefront. One after the other, the main parties pledged their support to cut pollution and stop extreme weather from growing more violent. Although they still found room for disagreement – the market-liberals favoured carbon pricing over bans, the conservatives wanted a slower shift to a clean economy – all bar the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) agreed to keep the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F).
“That consensus no longer exists,” said Habeck, when I saw him speak at a packed campaign rally in central Berlin earlier this month.
Though Germany’s mid-century targets to reach climate neutrality have not come into question, even the unsteady steps to get there have lost political support. The conservatives, who are likely to head the next government, have spent the last four years belittling the Greens and blaming climate policies for the country’s economic woes. The climate-denying AfD, which has cranked migration up to the top of the political agenda and is comfortably polling in second-place, has attacked all mainstream parties for following what it calls a Left-Green “eco-dictatorship”.
Even the centre-left’s Olaf Scholz (pictured above), who once declared himself the “climate chancellor”, now seems to avoid the topic altogether.
Germany is again facing a climate election – only this time, neither its voters nor its politicians seem to realise. It’s a trend that was on display across the continent during European elections in June, and in neighbouring countries that have held national elections over the last year. The climate has largely disappeared from campaign trails except as fodder for rightwing attacks. Green party vote shares have plunged, and they have lost seats in the handful of countries in which they made it into government, such as Austria, Belgium and Ireland.
Despite this, political scientists say there is little evidence of a widespread societal backlash against climate action. A few policies have indeed provoked fury from voters – among them, a botched clean heating law in Germany that was denounced by tabloids as “Habeck’s heating hammer” – but European support for cutting pollution has stayed steady.
Instead, experts cautiously attribute the fall in Green support to a drop in the salience of climate change – in other words, voters simply care less. The green wave that followed Greta Thunberg’s school strike movement has crashed, and in its wake Europeans have grown more worried by migration, inflation and war.
That presents a dilemma for Green parties across the continent. If their raison d’etre won’t prove as decisive as it did during previous elections, they can expect to shed seats whatever they say about climate on the campaign trail. But if they rebrand themselves as something else – say, a party serious about protecting democracy from threats at home and abroad – they may fail to mobilise their most passionate supporters.
So far, both dynamics are on display in Germany. The Greens are polling at around 12-15%, only a little less than their vote share in 2021. They appear to have won over some conservatives who agree with their vocal defence of Ukraine and who have been disappointed by their own party’s flirtation with the far right in recent weeks. But they are also losing young, left-leaning voters, who have criticised them for compromising too much on climate during their time in a coalition government, and who are increasingly at odds with them over military support for Israel.
In September, the entire board of the Green youth organisation resigned with an open letter that argued the party had become increasingly indistinguishable from other centrist parties. On the weekend, their former spokesperson, Sarah-Lee Heinrich, threw her support behind the Left party.
Campaigners say that, whether or not the Greens’ strategy of shifting to other topics proves successful on Sunday, climate action will still suffer from being pushed out of the picture. “It’s now turned into a vicious circle,” Luisa Neubauer, Germany’s best-known climate activist, told me last week. “If no one talks about the climate, at some point it’s only the far right talking about the climate – and that means talking climate down.”
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