Germany’s climate conservatives give ‘green’ a patriotic rebrand

Germany’s climate conservatives give ‘green’ a patriotic rebrand

A backlash among German voters against over-ambitious climate policies like a costly crackdown on home heating helped drive a major rightward shift in February's election.

But some voices on the German right are now wholeheartedly embracing a certain kind of green agenda, which they're pitching out of love for the German homeland and wrapping in the black, red and gold of patriotism.

Their rhetoric is a far cry from the progressive internationalism that's long dominated Germany's green movement, pushed by a coalition of ageing hippies, radical young activists and the upscale urban yuppies who've become the core constituency for the Green Party.

But voters knocked the Greens out of government and into opposition in February's election. The incoming Christian Democrat-led government now has much work to do if Germany hopes to make progress on the energy transition and the country's 2045 net-zero targets, which remain enshrined in law.

Even if the sense of urgency around 'greening' German infrastructure and industry may have waned – mainstream conservatives like the presumptive next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for instance, took potshots at a number of green policies during the campaign – decarbonisation remains a necessity.

That's not only because of EU mandates, but also to keep up with a global shift towards electrification, renewable power generation and more efficient utilisation of precious resources in a potentially de-globalising world.

The emergent right wing of the German environmental movement is ready for the moment with a moral reframing that downplays progressive themes of social justice and global responsibility in favour of more nationalist tones that just might appeal to voters who've traditionally questioned the need for major climate action.
An 'expression of patriotism'Florian Wagner, the executive director of a recently founded environmental group called Heimatwurzeln (“homeland roots”), prides himself on having once met Germany's late former chancellor Helmut Kohl, a stalwart conservative.



“Environment and climate protection are not the opposite of patriotism, they are its expression,” Wagner said at a recent event in Berlin, as he recalled shovelling away debris and mud from around his hometown in Germany's Ahr Valley in the wake of catastrophic floods in 2021.

The group's choice of name evokes a kind of national pride and pastoral patriotism that repels much of the German left. Their key argument: The transition to renewable energy will make Germany less dependent on unreliable imports, create prosperity in rural areas and benefit citizens instead of corporations.

This narrative is aimed at voters whom Wagner's group describes as "nostalgic conservatives", the "pragmatic middle class" and the "precarious milieu" – core Christian Democrat clienteles where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been gaining ground by railing against 'wokeist' wind turbines, electric cars and Germany's gradual phaseout of coal mining.

"Climate action is too important to exclude 40% of German society from it," said Daniel Müller, Heimatwurzeln’s policy director and a former speechwriter for Christian Democratic politician Volker Bouffier.

Müller believes that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is still within reach – if conservatives from all democratically committed parties join forces.
'Preservation of Creation'At the Heimatwurzeln event in Berlin, Gitta Connemann, a lawmaker in Germany's parliament, gave a guest speech in which she reminded the small audience that Germany’s first environment minister Walter Wallmann was a Christian Democrat, and "the preservation of creation" is enshrined in the party’s founding documents.



To achieve the country's climate goals, she said, policies need to be workable and beneficial for "firefighters, craftsmen and medium-sized business employees", whereas the outgoing centre-left government had been "indulging in daydreams" about limitless expansion of renewables, which currently account for two-thirds of Germany's total electricity generation.
The coalition's climate pledgeWithin the Christian Democrats, a relatively new group of lawmakers and politicians calling themselves the KlimaUnion ("Climate Union"), have also been opposing a rollback of climate policies.



Just after coalition talks kicked off in mid-March, the group published a report by prominent conservative legal experts that argue that Germany's existing climate policies can only be replaced by policies that are scientifically proven to be at least as effective.

Simply abolishing previous laws without replacements would be “unconstitutional”, the KlimaUnion's expert report contended.

The group's deputy chairman, Mark Helfrich, was tapped as a negotiator in the coalition talks alongside Andreas Jung, who was at one point rumored to be among the candidates for minister of energy and economic affairs.

Perhaps the clearest sign of climate change policy going mainstream is its prominence throughout the final coalition deal between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. The first chapter, for instance, declares: "We want to both remain an industrialised country and become climate-neutral."

Even some controversial policies covered in Green Party fingerprints, such as the controversial Building Energy Act, won't be thrown out entirely by the new government.

Despite spending years railing against the law's costly mandates for climate-friendly heating systems, the coalition deal struck by the conservatives envisions more of a mild revision.

(bts)