Hard Truths Come for Germany’s Climate Prophet

But in the immediate post-Merkel era, it was not her many imitators, but rather Scholz’s vice chancellor and minister for economics and climate change, the 53-year-old Green Party leader Robert Habeck, who emerged as the country’s most popular politician. For years previous, Habeck had been the most prominent exception to the trend of Merkel mimicry on Germany’s political scene. Whereas Merkel offered agendas comprised of a series of small incremental steps, Habeck preferred to start political discussions with an abstract analysis of the status quo. Whereas Merkel would justify policies by presenting them as lacking any viable alternative, Habeck declared that “nothing is alternative-less.”

The person least surprised by his initial success as climate minister might have been Habeck himself. They were the results of a plan he long ago developed for the Green Party. His vision has always been to transform the party—both its image among the German public, and its members’ own self-understanding. But what would remain the same would be the party’s desire for radical changes in society, especially on climate policy. “Whoever votes for us knows that they’re changing something of enormous consequence,” he said in 2019.

Rather than Merkel, Habeck has cited former U.S. President Barack Obama as an inspiration for political leadership. Like Obama, Habeck was a successful author before he was a politician, and at the source of both men’s charisma is their reflective use of language—the use of rhetoric to simultaneously project both emotion and doubt, intimacy and remove. But the resemblance also carries over to the content of their respective political projects. Like Obama, Habeck is trying to translate the energy of activism into the service of practical policy. The Green Party is Habeck’s vehicle. It’s just not yet clear if he will reach his goal. The current evidence suggests he’s instead moving in the opposite direction.

Habeck has recently declared his intention to run as the Green Party’s chancellor candidate in next year’s national election, to potentially replace Scholz. But Habeck’s personal popularity never durably translated to his party more broadly, or to the policies necessary to stem climate change. Three years after Habeck and his party entered government, the Greens are in greater disarray than ever before. This past week, after a series of disappointing regional elections, the leadership of both the national party and its youth wing resigned, the latter vowing to create a more activist party of their own. And climate policy has rarely felt more marginalized in national politics, crowded out by concerns over migration and refugees.

And so, the longer he stays in office, the more Habeck may be deepening the social divisions over climate policy that he always wanted to overcome.

For months on end, Habeck made regular appearances on nightly newscasts announcing new infrastructure to replace Russian gas; offering tips to German consumers about how much energy could be saved by taking shorter showers; or delivering chastising homilies about Germany’s moral responsibility for not taking the origins of its energy into account for so long. He was occupied with braiding the various strands of the crisis into a portrait of its wider meaning—the way the war in Ukraine illuminated the structural weaknesses of the German economy, the urgency of climate policy, and the very fragility of freedom.

These early interventions were greeted with ubiquitous praise—including from parts of German society, such as populist tabloids and traditionalist CEOs, that had never previously been sympathetic to the Greens. Habeck earned a 60 percent approval rating for his work as climate and economics minister. And the popularity of the vice chancellor carried over to his party at first. According to contemporaneous polls, the German public believed by a wide margin the Greens were the party most capable of addressing the country’s problems.

This was the culmination of Habeck’s long-gestating strategy for the Greens. His plan was to start with the activists and their sympathizers who had always comprised the party’s base. He would then expand beyond their ideological milieu by persuading those same activists that if the boundaries of their existing political commitments were wider, they would not have to compromise their principles in reaching out to other parts of the public. The only way to govern in a way that could effectively change the country was to arrange constant dialogue across all of society.

“The job is to understand our time,” Habeck said in 2018. “The party that most succeeds at identifying our era’s contradictions and showing paths out will win.” This is what is at stake for Habeck in the transformation of the Greens into Germany’s new hegemonic party of the center-left. The Greens must become the vehicle for gathering social consensus behind the idea that climate change requires radical solutions, from tens of billions of euros of investment in renewable energy to higher carbon taxes to new regulations on industry.

The Greens had always described themselves as an anti-party party. That was an expression used to describe the party’s closeness to its grassroots activists and their collective distance from standard parliamentary politics. Under Habeck, the Greens have become an anti-party party of an entirely different kind—one that is trying to transcend the country’s history of ideological division. In one 2018 interview, he admitted, “I hate moral rigor and ideology.”

Habeck’s distinct approach to managing the Green Party has clearly also informed his work as minister of economics and climate. From the beginning of his term, the vice chancellor exploited classically conservative rhetoric for a program of progressive change. When Habeck made his initial appeal for a dramatic expansion of the country’s wind-power infrastructure, he did so as part of an argument for “ecological patriotism.”

In the early months of the war in Ukraine, Habeck embraced a new role as a teller of uncomfortable truths about Germany’s patterns of consumption, earning credit for acknowledging what other politicians tried to repress as part of their own calculations of political advantage. Even his pep talks to the nation, as it anxiously approached its first winter facing the threat of energy shortages, were threaded with a certain wistfulness. “We know that we’re going to have to live with many impositions,” he said in August 2022, “but we also know why we’re doing so.” In a more philosophical mode, he reminded Germans that their consumption habits have always had a negative impact on the planet. “Our daily life leaves a trail of destruction behind on the Earth,” he said in one evening newscast.

This rhetoric has been a reversal of the rhetoric from the national election, in which every candidate for chancellor both acknowledged the reality of climate change but also tried to downplay the changes to normal life that would be necessary to address it. The suggestion was that everything would have to change but also everything could remain the same. Habeck was now putting an end to that illusion—and it briefly made him Germany’s most beloved politician.

Notably, Habeck hasn’t treated the war in Ukraine, and the reduction in access to Russian gas that has resulted, as a particular opportunity to accelerate Germany’s transition to renewables. In 2022, he did manage to pass an initial package of climate policies that would accelerate the expansion of the country’s renewable energy infrastructure, including by loosening permitting regulations. But those efforts have been overshadowed by his insistence on guaranteeing the existing volume of German energy without any interruption.

That, in turn, has meant searching for new sources of fossil fuels. In March 2022, Habeck traveled to Qatar to pose for photos with Doha’s leaders and tout the potential for new “energy partnerships”—that is, for new contracts to guarantee delivery of gas years into the future. He also gave his consent to the German government funding new gas fields in Africa and offered new subsidies for gasoline for cars. He fast-tracked new liquid natural gas infrastructure in Germany’s North Sea, infrastructure that the Greens have always vehemently opposed. And he explicitly gave permission to restart coal power plants that had already been shut down.

Habeck has done all this to respond to an unexpected crisis and the entirely expected German fears that it has produced. He talks constantly about doing everything in his power to maintain German “wealth”—not because wealth is inherently virtuous, but because he argues its absence would lead to social disorder. This is the fatalistic side to Habeck’s intellectualism: the sense that social consensus for policy changes rests on a basis of material cohesion, and that, for even the greatest literary talent, there are limits to rhetoric’s ability to create consensus. “Politics isn’t about knowing how to apply power, it’s about knowing how to be humble about power,” Habeck wrote in his 2018 book Who We Could Be.

For the Greens’ traditional base, this was the downside of having made an intellectual, rather than an activist, the leader of Germany’s traditional climate-focused party. Climate policy was a vehicle for Habeck to achieve a deeper aim—embodying a new modern sensibility of political responsibility that reconciles realism with progressivism. And what is more responsible than recognizing reality has changed at a time of war?

By the spring of 2023, after a winter of economic anxiety, the government agreed to a revised climate program over several days of negotiations among all three coalition parties. The new consensus had moved so far from the Greens’ original vision that it was hard not to treat the changes as an imposed defeat. The government dissolved binding carbon-emission targets for individual industrial sectors, weakened environmental regulations on infrastructure projects, and carved out various loopholes for the legally mandated transition over the next several decades to carbon-neutral home-heating technologies.

Habeck achieved only minimal face-saving concessions in return. The parties agreed to accelerate the construction of highways across the country—but those highways would now have to be flanked by solar panels. There was no indication that the German government was willing to abandon its climate goals—but also no indication those goals were urgent enough to justify deploying the full regulatory power of the state to achieve them. Habeck nevertheless soldiered onto news talk shows immediately after the announcement of the compromise to sell it as a sign of progress. “One has to say,” he said in a video published on Twitter, “it’s just not possible to achieve more in this coalition.”

“We will be poorer than we were before,” Habeck declared at the outset of the war. But the term we obscures as much as it reveals. It’s Habeck and the government he’s serving that will decide exactly who will be poorer. This is where intellectual exercise meets the hard constraints of material politics. Who should pay, and how much, for the investments necessary to transition to renewable energy? On what timeline should that transition take place?

And who should be forced to pay more for their existing energy consumption? Germany’s sudden wartime scarcity of gas has already obliged Habeck to offer an answer to this question. Over the summer in 2022, his ministry announced a plan to universally charge German gas consumers a fee, proportionate to their usage, that would be transferred to energy wholesalers. The policy immediately came under attack: Why should German citizens, many of whom were struggling to make ends meet, be forced to bail out energy companies? The government’s immediate response was to lower energy taxes on German consumers to even out the bailout surcharge. But with that decision, the energy-saving and climate-mitigating effects of higher gas prices were canceled out too.

The episode was only a prelude to Habeck’s next political failure, one that did even greater damage to his reputation. In the spring of 2023, Habeck proposed a new energy law banning the installation of new gas and oil-fired heating systems as of the start of the following year. Homeowners would instead be obliged to install more expensive renewable heating systems, such as heat pumps. When a preliminary draft of the law leaked, the conservative opposition protested in fiery terms. The Christian Democratic Union’s national leader, Friedrich Merz, claimed that Habeck’s ministry had lost touch with “normal” people, while the party leader in the state of Thuringia claimed Habeck was trying to create an “energy Stasi,” a reference to the eastern German secret police that used to compile dossiers on citizens’ private lives.

But Habeck’s bigger problem was that his own coalition partners saw the proposed law as an invitation to do damage to him personally. The free-market Free Democratic Party demanded a litany of loopholes be introduced to better protect homeowners, at the expense of the law’s effectiveness as climate policy; when those demands were met, the party claimed the law needed to be scrapped entirely. Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party was more circumspect, but the chancellor assured the public that he would defend working people’s concerns in the final version of the law, while doing little to dispel the depiction of Habeck in the tabloid press as a political dilettante. A watered-down version of the heating law eventually passed in the summer, but not without major damage having been done to Habeck’s reputation, with half of Germans claiming they wanted him to resign.

And so Habeck’s leadership has not changed the basic dynamics of climate policy. The other parties still tend to indulge in scare tactics to highlight precisely the moral costs of prioritizing it too highly: If coal is phased out too quickly, as the Green Party has advocated, Germans’ electricity bills could skyrocket. And a high carbon tax would similarly take money out of the pockets of hardworking German families through their utility bills and at the gas station. (How else are families with young kids supposed to get around other than with German-made cars?) And, yes, regulations making it harder to build single-family homes might reduce emissions—but why rob people of enjoying a backyard of their own where they can one day host a grill party?

After two years in office, the Greens are now both leaderless and rudderless. Habeck is a candidate for chancellor but seemingly in name only. And his capacity for reconciliation as climate minister has been tested beyond its very limits. Not every contradiction he has encountered has been able to be dissolved in some higher intellectual synthesis. And so he has exposed a truth he had tried to deny: that it’s in the nature of politics that some policy dilemmas can only be resolved by forcefully taking one side—precisely against the other.