“The mistakes of Germany’s topmost climate protection party”

The German Green Party is at risk of becoming the weakest parliamentary group after this week’s elections, although extreme weather patterns in the Caribbean and the dieselgate scandal at home have shifted the political focus to the environmentalist party’s core competencies, Thomas Fricke writes in a commentary on Spiegel Online. “It might be a bitter truth, but there is plenty of evidence that people are just not mobilised by climate threats,” which are – as of yet – too abstract and distant, Fricke says. The Greens give the impression of putting climate above everything else, including jobs and wealth, “which is a message that hardly gets through to a large part of the populace”, he says. The Greens would be wise to not treat climate protection as an outstanding “special issue”, but instead to view it “as a fixed part of everyday regular governance” that couples emissions reduction with economic growth and competitive market economy thinking, Fricke argues.

Read the article in German here.

For background on the German voters’ attitude towards climate protection, see the CLEW interview with pollster Emnid.