Climate debates and war in Ukraine on citizens’ minds as city of Berlin votes again

In the campaign, climate and energy issues have largely been focused on discussions about Berlin’s transportation policy. The Greens, for example, have advocated for a transportation policy oriented away from cars and toward more environmentally friendly modes of transport, proposing new fees for drivers that would help subsidize greater investments in bicycle infrastructure and public transit. Their top candidate, Bettina Jarasch, has called for greater investments into car-free zones, including along a main street in the city’s central Mitte neighborhood.

The CDU, meanwhile, says “demonizing” cars and drivers is the wrong approach: its leaders want to continue investing in auto-related infrastructure projects, such as the extension of the A100 highway that will cut through central districts of the capital. The SPD, for its part, has sought to find middle ground between the two parties’ positions. The party of incumbent mayor Giffey wants to expand infrastructure for electric vehicles and says an A100 extension should be left up to the voters. It also advocates for a 365-euro annual transit ticket to encourage people to choose greener transport options.

Berlin’s government has committed to making the city carbon-neutral by 2045, but has said it hopes to reach its goal sooner than that. By 2030, the city plans to reduce its emissions by 70 percent compared with 1990. When the current coalition took office in late 2021, it vowed to invest in renewable energy and create a committee to regularly evaluate the city’s progress toward meeting its climate goals. The election will impact the extent to which these goals continue to be a priority for Berlin’s government: if the SPD and the Greens end up back in the governing coalition, they will likely continue their work on this front.

Pressure to make Berlin climate neutral 15 years earlier than planned has mounted since the last election, with initiative Klimaneustart Berlin securing a referendum after collecting over 261,000 signatures for its campaign Berlin 2030 climate neutral. Eligible residents are set to vote on whether Berlin’s target should be amended in law on 26 March.

As the city with its some 3.7 million inhabitants prepares to vote, the war in Ukraine, and the resulting impact on Germany and Europe’s energy landscape, remain the biggest topic in German politics. For most of the fall and summer, voters named energy supplies as their top issue; now, as fears of potential energy shortages have quieted, the war has risen back to first place again. In a late January poll from Forsa, 68 percent of those surveyed named the war as their top issue, followed by 22 percent who named energy supplies and 14 percent who named climate issues.

The federal government has introduced various measures to ease the pain of higher prices on German consumers, including subsidies to help cover energy bills and a cap on energy prices going forward. These issues are on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots — but are things that are largely determined by the federal government, however, which makes them difficult to debate in the Berlin campaign. “The difficulty for the parties… is these are problems that actually can’t be solved on the city level,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political analyst. Parties can vow to do things like streamline services for refugees, he said, but “because of the political structure [in Germany], there are no real possibilities to solve the fundamental problems themselves.”

Ongoing protests by climate activists from the Last Generation and other groups have also made headlines in recent weeks and months. The German capital had been one of the main locations of protests, which could impact the way voters consider the parties in Berlin. Last month, climate activists staged protests in the western German village of Lützerath, which is being demolished in order to expand a nearby lignite mine. The Lützerath protests come on the heels of the climate-related protests in Berlin and cities across Germany, with activists from the Last Generation movement blocking runways at Berlin’s airport and blockading sections of the autobahn in an effort to get attention from the national government.

The increasing pressure from climate activists has put the Greens, who are part of the national governing coalition, in a tough spot: they’ve had to defend their more pragmatic choices since entering government, while climate activists say they’re abandoning their values as a climate-focused party.

Berlin is, in many ways, an exception within Germany and the city plays a unique role in German society. As the country’s biggest city and a cultural center, its protest-happy young population and range of new companies working in the tech and climate industries make parts of it much more progressive than Germany as a whole. Berlin is also unique because it was a divided city until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, meaning it is still shaped both by old West German attitudes and East German history.

Structurally, Berlin is one of the country’s three city-states, meaning it has both a city-level government and the equivalent of a state parliament. It is further divided into twelve separate districts, each coming with their own borough mayor. Members from the Berlin governing coalition sit in the Bundesrat, Germany’s second legislative chamber, alongside representatives from the other 15 states; the mayor of Berlin is equivalent to a state governor.

“The structural problems that Berlin has, together with a certain mentality of … being a world city but on the other hand having very local and very normal problems, all this together makes Berlin very special,” Peter Matuschek, the chief political analyst at Forsa, told Clean Energy Wire.

In large part because of the city’s unique political position and in part because this is a repeat election, analysts say Berlin’s election is unlikely to have much of a direct effect on the federal governing coalition. But it may hint at what’s to come in other state-level elections slated for later this year, for example in the industry powerhouse Bavaria and the wealthy central state of Hesse (both 8 October).