How Germany's Green Party Lost Its Luster - The New York Times - 0 views
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he has conceded he misjudged the mood of crisis fatigue in the country after a winter of coping with surging energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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“The feeling of great time pressure has dissipated; instead of the fear of a loss of gas supplies, other concerns have come to the fore,” he told the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “This change wasn’t so clear to me at first, and maybe that’s why I didn’t do everything right in the situation.”
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Indeed, what was pragmatic to many Germans was seen as a betrayal of the party’s long-cherished principles by many of the Greens’ rank and file.
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“The Greens were on the way to being a party of the political middle,” said Manfred Güllner, director of the Berlin-based Forsa Institute, a polling firm. “Now the Greens have landed back to exactly where they were for a long time: a small party that caters to its followers that is far removed from being a major party.”
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As the Greens have pivoted back to their traditional agenda, the party has bumped up against the limits of what many Germans are willing to sacrifice at a time of economic insecurity stemming from the war in Ukraine, higher inflation and the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic.
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Exhibit A in voter disillusionment was a bill that Mr. Habeck promoted requiring that newly installed home heating systems run on at least 65 percent renewable energy starting next year.
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“They squandered a lot of their success because they seemed detached from ordinary people,” said Markus Ziener, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “Instead of setting incentives, they were seen as telling people what’s right and what’s wrong, as wanting to lecture people.”
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Experts said the law, which was passed in weakened form in September, has helped fuel the growing popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which is polling at more than 20 percent, around the highest in its history.
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Like other far-right parties across Europe, the AfD has added opposition to climate policies to its agenda, alongside issues like immigration, seeking to capitalize on the economic anxieties of working people.
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“What happened with the Heizungsgezetz was all of a sudden literally the Greens were knocking on people’s doors, asking, ‘Show me your heating, and it has to change,’” said Andrea Römmele, a political scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. “It was too fast.”
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“It’s the deepest crisis in the Greens’ history,” he said. “Robert Habeck is the most talented politician in Germany by far. He has become a scapegoat. But he can get them past it.”