“Yellow energy”

German economic liberal party FDP is increasingly wooing adversaries of the energy transition and climate policy sceptics in its bid to reenter parliament, write Anna-Sophia Lang and Gerald Traufetter in Der Spiegel. The FDP fell short of the required number of votes in 2013, for the first time in postwar history. During the state elections in Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), party head Christian Lindner successfully employed a strategy of opposing wind power expansion – “now he is using the same trick for the federal elections,” the authors say. Most other parties, except the right-wing populist party AfD, “do not cater for the turbine opponents,” they argue. Lindner, however, stresses that “we don’t question the entire energy transition,” while at the same time speaking of an “uncontrolled and at times ideological” expansion of renewable power – an ambiguous strategy also used by the AfD in the context of immigration, Lang and Traufetter write.

Read the article in German here (behind paywall).

See the CLEW factsheet Fighting windmills: When growth hits resistance for background.