The turnaround in arms went surprisingly smoothly for the Greens. It should look very different with the upcoming nuclear turnaround. With his “stress test” Habeck has bought himself time for the last three nuclear reactors still running in Germany. Now it’s upgraded.
The Greens’ dilemma has two long legs, a pleasantly insinuating voice and a well-known name: Robert Habeck. The Green number one in the federal cabinet now knows that the long-established anti-nuclear establishment will not make it as easy for him as his foreign minister colleague Annalena Baerbock did for the pacifists from the “Peace” faction.
The Greens managed the weapon turnaround surprisingly quietly, but in the case of the relatively small nuclear turnaround, the signs are pointing to noise.
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The climate minister bought himself time with his “stress test” for the last three nuclear reactors still in operation in Germany. Whether the last three stony hurdles before the final phase-out of nuclear power can continue for a while, either with their old or with new fuel rods, will only be decided in four weeks. Officially there is a ceasefire until then. However, all sides use it to upgrade vigorously – for the nuclear battle in late summer.
The Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation, a political front organization of the Greens, has recently organized a “study” to determine what the organization has long known: nuclear power, which is: “unsafe, unprofitable, unnecessary.”
The Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management continues to see nuclear power as a “high-risk technology” and emphasizes the safety risks of continued operation, despite the assessment of the Technical Monitoring Association, for example.
And then there is Jürgen Trittin. Since his birthday a few days ago, the manager of the nuclear phase-out has practically gone under 68. Trittin’s lust for a fight was then immediately felt by a Green party friend.
Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who compromised a nuclear “stretching operation” into the Berlin political landscape, had to be sorted by the old white green man as a “family and social politician”, which not only sounds suspiciously patriarchal, but also like “dingy”.
The drawer in which Trittin’s Lower Saxony companion Gerhard Schröder once locked away the family politicians of his party. Legally, “stretching operation” and “extension of the term” are the same, Trittin informed the party “friend” via Spiegel.
Finally, the now 83-year-old Christian Ströbele reported from his extra-parliamentary off-screen: “The Greens always wanted to ‘create peace without weapons’, now ‘peace with more and more heavy weapons’. Now instead of ‘Ne nuclear power plants – nuclear power plants, yes please’ against the alternative, continue with Russian gas? When will the next pillar topple? Just don’t.”
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For those interested in how the Greens used to think, the eco-senior’s Twitter account is a fruitful treasure trove. Example one: “We demonstrated en masse” against the free trade agreement with Canada, which the federal government is currently agreeing on with green participation.
Example Two: Want to bring Putin to his knees with an oil/gas embargo? In view of the further burning of the coal “not a good idea”. Example three: Sweden’s entry into NATO, celebrated by the Green Foreign Minister? “70 Kurdish/Turkish refugees have to be extradited for this”, a “betrayal of human rights”.
Example four: As Chancellor Olaf Scholz put it, NATO is a defensive alliance that does not attack any countries – “What was that about when NATO bombed Belgrade, houses, factories, passenger trains in Serbia in 1999?” Or Afghanistan. “NATO is also attacking countries. Unfortunately.”
Many Greens should be happy that the undeterred left-wing man has not been a member of the Bundestag for five years. However, Ströbele has an impressive 282,000 followers on Twitter, making him his own loud medium.
In the end, Habeck is faced with an unpleasant choice: either scare away the Trittins and Ströbeles in his party – or the younger ones, who see the Greens as a centered party with realpolitik, which could one day nominate the Federal Chancellor, who would then be called Robert Habeck.
As if these inner-green conflicts weren’t enough, there is also the threat of pogo within the traffic light coalition: the liberals want to keep the nuclear reactors running. And not just for climate protection reasons. But also out of European political solidarity.
It was only at the most recent summit of European energy ministers that it became apparent that the “partners” in Europe feel little inclination to save gas in favor of Germany – especially when the Federal Republic does not even make use of its own opportunities.
And lets continue to produce his piles. Those monsters that are not a threat to Germany’s European neighbors, but a promise. Emanuel Macron euphorically calls nuclear power plants a “historic opportunity” for his country.
The liberals in the Bundestag applauded suspiciously the “Stuttgart Declaration” by 20 profound engineering scientists in favor of nuclear power. However, the inventor professors do not want to be content with an extension of the term, and that makes their call particularly explosive. They fundamentally question the energy transition once conceived by red-green.
The problem with this: The six women and 14 men know their way around, some have been dealing with the sense of the various German energy exits from the perspective of feasibility for 20 years. You know very well that the long-time Chancellor Angela Merkel is by no means the only one to blame for Germany’s disastrous dependence on Russian gas.
