Economics Minister Habeck is under criticism. And rightly so. Because the Green does not meet the requirements of the office. Rather, it is becoming more and more of a burden for Germany.
It is the job of the Federal Minister of Energy to ensure that electricity is as cheap and reliable as possible.
It is the climate protection minister’s job to shape Germany’s energy supply in such a way that the climate is protected.
It is the Federal Minister of Economics’ job to protect Germany’s economy.
In all three disciplines, Robert Habeck does not meet the requirements. The chancellor’s attempt to get him out with unusually emotional attacks on the leader of the opposition changes nothing. Of course, Scholz is right, even if the name of his predecessor was not explicitly mentioned.
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In fact, Angela Merkel was Gerhard Schröder’s closest ally; she practically handed Germany over to Russia when it came to gas. In the naive expectation that Vladimir Putin could eventually become a second Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was yesterday.
Something else matters today. And there you can hardly avoid the finding of the opposition leader Friedrich Merz: The chancellor and his economics minister are “making a fool of the whole country”.
Perhaps the Greens will also pay a price for the ideologically obstinate, extremely expensive and party-tactically motivated decision to keep two of the three nuclear power plants that have been approved for shutdown as emergency reserves. Because the tough anti-nuclear fighters are the old ones in the party – the Jürgen Trittins, the Gorleben generation. The younger generation, the Fridays for future generation, do not primarily rely on the fight against the alleged “nuclear state”, but rather on climate protection.
And, as the emissions figures show, this works best with and not without nuclear power. That’s why France’s carbon footprint is so much better than Germany’s. It will still be a long time before wind and sun can replace fossil energies plus the transitional energies of gas and nuclear power, if they manage to do so at all.
Whether Germany is capable of surviving as an industrial country with wind, sun and at some point hydrogen has yet to be proven. It is a big and very risky bet that the political energy transition activists have made.
That’s why Robert Habeck’s appearance on Sandra Maischberger’s talk show was so revealing – and shocking. Verbosely getting more and more entangled in the contradictions, the Federal Minister of Economics made the useless attempt to downplay the threat of mass insolvencies as a result of the record inflation fueled by the explosion in energy prices.
Habeck’s terrible message: If bakers and butchers are left behind because they can no longer pass the exorbitant energy prices on to their customers, because they then have to pay maybe 40, maybe 50 cents for a roll – then it’s like this: “I I can imagine that certain industries will simply stop producing for a while. Don’t go bankrupt, but…”
The German middle class has a patron saint in every government – and that is the Federal Minister of Economics qua office. The Mittelstand is also Germany’s backbone – which is not only true in economic terms, but above all in socio-political terms. Germany’s medium-sized companies and the many family businesses are the guarantors of Germany’s political stability. If the companies cross the Jordan, Germany will cross the Jordan.
Apart from the fact that a Federal Minister of Economics should already know what an insolvency is. He should also know what delaying insolvency means, namely, in Habeck’s words, “stop producing first”.
In the Bundestag, the leader of the Greens parliamentary group, Britta Haßelmann, called nuclear energy a “high-risk technology”. She probably believes that herself, too. Others don’t believe that, if it were otherwise, there wouldn’t be an unprecedented renaissance in nuclear energy. That’s why the German claim about the high-risk technology is arrogant, it contains a tremendous reproach to our neighbors, the French, the Dutch, the British, for example: You don’t protect your people. That is very close to the German character, from which the world should heal.
Conversely, it means: What use is the phase-out of nuclear energy to German citizens if new nuclear power plants are being built all around Germany? And what good is it if the country that builds the safest nuclear power plants, those of the third generation, based on the performance of its engineers, then shuts them down?
Finally, Habeck’s decision to exclude the last nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony from the emergency reserve is completely absurd. Just so that, as the head of the CSU state group in the Bundestag, Alexander Dobrindt, put it, the Lower Saxony Greens don’t have to take down their beautiful poster “Bye, bye nuclear power”.
It was also Dobrindt who had the right, albeit very hearty, answer to the Federal Minister of Economics and Technology regarding the looming wave of insolvencies in Germany: “People don’t give a shit what you call it if they become unemployed.”
Habeck’s decision to finally phase out nuclear power by April next year at the latest is pure green ideology. At a time when every megawatt hour counts, it is extremely risky. And it is a huge burden for Germany’s future as an industrial nation.
The fact that an economy minister, of all people, is taking these risks shows that his party’s peace of mind is more important to him than the country’s well-being. Such an attitude is actually intolerable for a minister.
