Germany

[Doc]

Germany opposes US-backed global waiver on protection for COVID-19 vaccines

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[Parodite]

Saving democracy by banning the AfD. Sure, smart move. Banning AfD would prove their point and making them even more popular.

A stunning coincidence

Question is, should those who want to ban AfD be banned as well, or maybe instead?

[Typhoon]

The Sauer-Krauts may have had it.

FT | Green-bashing in Bavaria: German parties face voters’ reckoning
Opposition says Greens ‘make policies with a crowbar’; candidates pelted with eggs ahead of regional elections


The Greens in Bavaria knew the public mood was turning hostile. But they never expected anyone to start throwing stones at them.

At an event last month in Neu-Ulm, one nearly hit Katharina Schulze, the Greens’ top candidate. For her, it was the nadir of an election campaign in the southern German state that has seen Green activists routinely spat on, insulted and threatened.

“The problem is that our political rivals are adding fuel to the fire, and that is stoking this negative atmosphere,” she said.

Bavaria and the neighbouring state of Hesse go to the polls on Sunday in elections that are being seen as a referendum on chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. All three parties in his coalition — the Social Democrats, Greens and liberals — have slumped in the polls in recent months as voters blame them for recession, inflation and high energy costs.

But as the Bavarian campaign has shown it is the Greens who are turning into the German public’s favourite whipping boy. And they have the scars to prove it.

Hecklers call them “forest-destroyers” for supporting wind farms and “warmongers” for backing Ukraine. At one Green event last month in Hart, in south-eastern Bavaria, a man handed out tomatoes, eggs and stones to hurl at the speakers.


Katharina Schulze says hostility to the Greens has also been fuelled by a ‘targeted campaign of disinformation’
Attendees had asked for particularly heavy stones, and eggs that were rotten, he told German media. “It’s just a joke,” he added.

Hubert Aiwanger, leader of the rightwing Free Voters, says this is just typical of Bavaria’s rough-and-tumble, beer-tent politics. “Northern Germany is just more prim and proper than Bavaria,” he said. “If you want to score points in a beer tent you can’t give a reading like in an upper school for girls.”

Anyway, Aiwanger adds, the Greens have only themselves to blame for the animosity. It was the Green-controlled economy ministry in Berlin, after all, that pushed through a highly unpopular law this year to phase out gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps.

“Even half of Green voters were against [it] and the government passed it anyway,” he said.

But Schulze said hostility to the Greens has also been fuelled by a “targeted campaign of disinformation”, particularly about the boiler law. Markus Söder, the state’s prime minister, claimed a new heat pump cost an eye-watering €300,000: in fact it’s €11,000-€25,000.

Indeed Söder, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), has made Green-bashing the leitmotif of his campaign. A politician who once flirted with the eco-party now accuses it of lacking a “Bavarian gene”.


The Green’s Robert Habeck, German vice-chancellor, has become a focus of protests © Matthias Balk/picture alliance/dpa
At an event in Kloster Andechs outside Munich last week, Söder accused the Greens of “ideological double standards” for refusing to extend the lifetime of Germany’s last three nuclear power stations in the middle of an energy crisis, and denounced the heat pump law as “interference in people’s property rights”.

“The Greens make policies with a crowbar,” said Martin Huber, CSU general secretary. “They are so ideological that they don’t care if society accepts what they’re proposing.”

Söder’s strategy reflects a shift in German politics. State elections were traditionally centred on regional issues — such as education, policing and transport. But since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the cost of living crisis it triggered, that is changing.

“More than ever, voters are using regional elections to pass judgment on the federal government,” said Stefan Kornelius, political editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich-based newspaper. Söder has seized on that as an opportunity. “It allows him to cast himself as a leader of the opposition, against Berlin.” 

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Bavaria’s leader. During the summer his coalition partners, the Free Voters, became mired in controversy when the Süddeutsche revealed that Hubert Aiwanger had, as a schoolboy, been found in possession of an antisemitic pamphlet.

Aiwanger, who is also Bavaria’s deputy prime minister, accused the media of a “smear campaign”. But Söder came under massive pressure to sack him. In the end, though, he opted to keep him on, insisted he would continue his alliance with the Free Voters after the election and ruled out any tie-up with the Greens.


Schulze said the Aiwanger affair was emblematic of a “shift to the right” in Bavaria, where the three main rightwing and centre-right parties — the CSU, FW and Alternative for Germany — are together polling at 66 per cent.

There is no doubt, however, that the CSU’s rhetorical fusillades against the Greens — its unfounded claims that they want to force Germans to go vegan and use gender-neutral language — are falling on fertile ground.

In Kloster Andechs, Söder earned peals of laughter when he made fun of Green foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and her recent trip to Mongolia.

“She marched through the Mongolian steppe, found a yurt . . . and told the lady of the house who was busy with her kids and her herd and other stuff all about her feminist foreign policy in Berlin,” he said. Germany’s leaders, he said, should “defend German interests” rather than “try to convert the world”.

The crowd in Kloster Andechs cheered Söder to the rafters. Anni, a 55-year-old local munching on a pretzel, said she was with him on the heating law. “My parents’ house has an oil-fired boiler — will I have to rip that out now?” she asked. “Complying with the law will cost me a fortune.”

The Greens admit they face an uphill battle in Bavaria. They are currently at 15 per cent in the polls, down from 17.6 per cent in the last state elections in 2018. The CSU is meanwhile on 36 per cent.

But Katharina Schulze notes that before 2018 the Greens were stuck at around 5-9 per cent and have polled as high as at 20 per cent in recent years. “We still have a strong base in Bavaria,” she said. “The best is yet to come.”

Selected comments:

A very Greens FT propaganda. So sad.

The FT has lost its plot. More and more green propaganda and lack of critical thinking and independent analysis that made this paper famous. Commentaries are now like those of the NY Times or the WSJ instead of higher quality we were accustomed to.

The Green party has been in power for years now, and Germany keeps boasting one of the most carbon intensive economies in the world. Last time I checked 1 KWh of German electricity produced 500grams of CO2! That is twenty times more than that of French or Swedish electricity. Yet they keep pontificating about nuclear, and heat pumps. They keep make old people feel guilty about using AC, while imposing the same technology for heating... Their dogmatism is the first cause of polarization. The Green party might be a victim of disinformation, but they too have sponsored disinformation on an industrial scale. The Heinrich-Böll Stiftung, as we speak, is conducting a mendacious campaign against nuclear electricity throughout Europe. There is nothing naive about the way German Greens fight nuclear to promote Russian gas instead, believe me.

The campaign against Aiwanger's supposed "antisemitism" was such an obvious lie by mainly Green-voting journalists that his numbers in the polls actually went up. That's why Soeder kept him on.

People are gradually seeing through the Greens and their media cronies, because they feel the consequences of what they voted for in the past - even in "NIMBY"-Bavaria.

speaking of disinformation... you write
[...] a new heat pump cost [...] : in fact it’s €11,000-€25,000.
I just had one put in. to heat 360m2 in the Netherlands (less extreme winters than bavaria) it cost 45k + an upgrade to the electricals (most homes don't have 3 phase)

You can not downplay the cost of a heat pump to its purchase price. Considering modifications in your house to make it heat-pump-ready and installation can easily make the bill rise to 200.000 Euro which Mr Habeck himself admitted a few days ago. Also consider the lack of specialists in the country to implement this plan.
For most of the people this plan was completely absurd.


Aiwanger wouldn’t get my vote but he’s really not a nazi. So voters did not react kindly to Sueddeutsche newspaper’s allegations about the time when he was a schoolboy - the support for Aiwanger has in fact surged.

It’s yet another example of the German establishment trying to smear politicians with opposing views rather than put forward real arguments to win the political debates (refugees, green policies incl replacing old boilers, shutting nuclear plants, cutting forests to “plant” wind turbines etc). It becomes about so and so is a bad person, is far right and should be disqualified. The reason is because the social democrats and greens are struggling to explain to voters that it’s worth spending eur 30k+ on electric heat pumps instead of much cheaper alternatives

The Green Party was founded as anti-nuclear movement. Shutting down nuclear and keeping coal is the opposite of "climate science".
And speaking of science, the Greens have a long track record of (at least initially) being against many innovations, from cable tv to mobile phones to GM crops.