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WINTER IS COMING: In a moment of reckoning, the German government this week put an end to yet another decades-long belief. It turned out to be an illusion just like German Russia policy in general: “We must not delude ourselves, cutting gas supplies is an economic attack on us by Putin,” said Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck. “It is clearly Putin’s strategy to create insecurity, drive up prices and divide us as a society.” Habeck announced stage two of a three-stage alert system — one stop short of a full emergency.
Doomsday soon: In a next and last stage, the government would take control of energy distribution. Given the sharp reduction of supply from Russia in recent weeks, it appears wise to not exclude further escalation — Habeck said it was time to get serious about the consequences of supply cuts. Businesses, politicians and economists have been blunt on what empty storage facilities would mean once winter arrives, painting an economic, social and political scenario of doom. (German business morale slumped in June amid worries that it’ll get worse, according to fresh numbers. More.)
Never waste a chance for a good fight: At the same time, it’s not that energy policy has become an illusion and ideology free zone overnight. Habeck reminded Germans that his party told them so on the speed, or lack thereof, of a turn toward renewables, for what that’s worth; and an old fight over nuclear energy has also resurfaced — we look at this and other coalition troubles just below.
Weekend summitry: Economic and energy issues are high up on the list of issues Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to discuss with his guests at a summit of G7 leaders at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps, starting Sunday, with first arrivals as early as Saturday. In a display of new priorities, the G7 will mull a call for using tax money for natural gas projects as a response to Russia’s war in Ukraine — potentially clashing with the group’s own climate pledges. Here’s a preview.
Watch out for more — including our signature liveblog — on the G7 summit, on the currently ongoing European Council meeting in Brussels, and on next week’s grand finale of the summitry week, a NATO meeting in Madrid, on politico.eu.
**A message from T&E: Energy security equals freedom. Prolonging our dependence on gas means prolonging our dependence on Putin and other autocrats. On 7 July, MEPs can help create for a secure, sustainable, democratic future, by saying no to the inclusion of gas in the EU’s Green Taxonomy. Find out more at nogasintaxonomy.eu.**
PANZER, KEIN PANZER: Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht was in the hot seat on Wednesday as she had to defend the German government’s, and her very own, track record on military support for Ukraine. A remarkable scene was her justification for why the government is sending “Gepard” anti-aircraft tanks but continues to refuse to supply Kyiv with other heavy gear like “Marder” or “Leopard” tanks: Lambrecht argued with wild gesticulation and a rather patronizing tone why the “Gepard” marked the exception because it was actually no tank at all.
Heavy weapons incoming: Meanwhile, German Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzers finally arrived this week in Ukraine, and the country also signed a contract with German manufacturers to supply the IRIS-T air defense system in the coming months, Scholz said.
COALITION TROUBLE: Christian Lindner added another contentious issue to the list of things troubling the coalition when he broke ranks on EU plans to ban the car — the combustion engine, to be precise — by 2035. Speaking this week at a conference of Germany’s industrial lobby, the BDI, the finance minister and leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) said the EU’s draft policy was “wrong” and that the German government “will not agree to this European legislation this week.” (More here.)
Oops: Without Lindner’s assent, the German government would have to abstain when it comes to a vote in the Council planned for June 28 in Luxembourg, according to its own rules of procedure.
Picking fights: The government had previously agreed to back this piece of legislation, including in rather unequivocal terms in the coalition treaty. A wide array of reasons made Lindner backtrack — a looming economic crisis in the first place, then a deserting core electorate, prompting a return to the liberal ideology of a lean state, and, when it comes to mere power terms, revenge for some meanness by the Green partner.
Liberals vs. Greens: There have been reconsiderations of bigger magnitude in recent German politics, across the coalition — but the end of the car is perhaps the single most important deliverable for the Green party or at least its old-school environmentalist wing, which is under pressure from both within and outside the party: Lindner picked a very symbolic fight, perhaps topped only by the Green party’s stance on nuclear energy.
Oh, wait! Habeck has announced that more coal will be used to produce electricity to save gas. For many in the FDP, that’s between not enough and sheer madness, given there are still functioning nuclear plants — which will be shut down by the end of the year, or so is the plan. “It’s urgently time to guarantee the continued operation of nuclear power plants for at least five years,” said FDP vice chair Wolfgang Kubicki, echoing Lindner and leading opposition politicians.
Greens on the offensive: Green co-leader Ricarda Lang has called for further relief packages, questioning compliance with the debt brake rule next year, putting pressure on Lindner and thereby, for her part, reconsidering the coalition treaty. Sustainable finances are for the Liberals what sustainable energy is for the Greens, and as dear perhaps to his electorate as only the coalition’s promise that taxes in the high-tax country would not increase further. Saskia Esken, co-leader of Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, did her part in suggesting an increase in taxes was not to be excluded.
Stay tuned: Lindner plans to present his draft budget to his Cabinet colleagues next week, and he plans to remain in compliance with the debt brake, according to officials.
TAKE ONE STEP BACK: All this isn’t about visibility in public only, about pleasing voters or a beauty contest — we’re at the heart of politics in crisis times, debating how to deal with the cost of war, inflation and not least energy policies that now are backfiring. The coalition is aware it will be a defining moment, one way or the other.
New questions: “With the war, a great deal of what we had left out of the coalition agreement came to the surface,” said Lang on Thursday evening, speaking on a panel at the Progressives Zentrum think tank, the coalition’s ideological watering hole. “Namely, with completely new force, distribution issues.” Whether the three parties will be able to agree on these questions, said Lang, “is going to be the litmus test.”
Focus: Kevin Kühnert, the SPD’s secretary general, argued that the government will have to focus on those in need — “smart policy is not to throw money at everybody en masse,” he said. “We’ll need to define who needs relief … that is going to be the actual question of the coming months,” said Kühnert, announcing both further transfers and further impositions for the coalition partners.
Rallying cry: Carina Konrad, a deputy Bundestag group leader, during the panel discussion could only wish for everyone to “see this country’s economic strength as a chance” and launched an appeal to hold out: The distribution challenge, she said, “seems to tear us apart on the outside, but only makes us stronger on the inside.”
PROTEST BUSINESS AS USUAL: With the G7 summit kicking off in Elmau this weekend, opponents of the meeting have upheld tradition and voiced their dismay or registered protests. Also, while the police are still investigating the incident, they suspect that far-left extremist globalization critics set eight police cars on fire in Munich to demonstrate their disapproval of the high-level gathering in the nearby mountains. Looks like business as usual — has the whole issue not changed profoundly in times when the G7 countries stand firmly against a revanchist and murderous world view?
Remember Iraq? “The situation is certainly different from the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, where Erdogan, Trump and Putin, three clearly authoritarian figures, arrived,” said Simon Teune, a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Protests and Movements in Berlin. “But when it comes to the question of war and peace, it’s well remembered by the protest groups today that the U.S. waged a war of aggression in 2003.”
It’s the climate, stupid: But not just the U.S., other G7 members have disappointed those inclined to take exception to the summit repeatedly over the years, Teune said. “I recently remembered that Angela Merkel was proclaimed climate chancellor in 2007, also in the context of the G8 summit that year in Heiligendamm,” he said, adding that that seems exuberant from today’s perspective as the road to our current climate situation is paved with missed opportunities. “To that extent, there are many who continue to look at G7 meetings with criticism,” he said.
Burden sharing: Asked if today’s multiple crises, some of which are much more immediate than the long-term consequences of lax climate policies, did not distract people from opposing the G7, Teune said it was more complex than that. “The unequally shared burden of transformation processes is a mega-issue,” he said, adding that some groups have already included that in their deliberations. “Fridays For Future, for example, learned very quickly that you can’t just demand climate policy measures without thinking about social justice at the same time,” he said.
Peace, at what price? Meanwhile, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has divided Germany into two groups of roughly the same size, one apprehensive regarding arms deliveries, the other one keen on supporting a country Germany owes a great debt to. The division also runs through G7 opponents, Teune said. “I suspect that within the alliance against the summit in Elmau, there are the same dilemmas as in the rest of the country,” he said. “That on the one hand you don’t want more violence and on the other hand you see that doing nothing will not improve the situation of the people on the ground.”
CALL FOR RESIGNATIONS: Kassel’s Documenta, a formerly renowned international art festival, this week took down a mural full of anti-Semitic stereotypes only after heavy criticism. The work by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi features a pig with a soldier’s helmet bearing the word “Mossad.” Another figure has both sidelocks and SS insignia. Media spared the needless effort to discuss whether or not those are antisemitic tropes, and differed only on the question of who’s responsible for the scandal.
Most resignations had yet to happen by the time of publication. Documenta director Sabine Schormann insisted in an interview with local Hessische-Niedersächsische Allgemeine paper that the problem was not the message, but its specifically German reception: “Due to our different cultural experiences, [the artists] realized too late that such a motif is absolutely unacceptable in Germany,” she said.
Bye bye reputation: “It is to be feared that, even if no further antisemitic works appear, this Documenta will finally go down in the history of the Kassel show as the ‘Antisemitism Documenta’,” Niklas Maak wrote in the feuilleton pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “All this can only mean for the Documenta management — which, although it could have, did not prevent this scandal — that it must assume responsibility and resign.”
Who’s to blame? No doubt about that for Philipp Peyman Engel in the Jüdische Allgemeine Jewish newspaper: “Specifically, the fact that Documenta is now making headlines around the world with antisemitic scandals instead of subtle reflections on art is primarily the responsibility of Schormann, of Hesse’s minister of art Angela Dorn, Kassel Mayor Christian Geselle, as well as the federal Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth.” The latter better resign, he suggests: the Ministry of Culture “must be entrusted to someone who credibly stands up against hatred of Jews. Someone who exercises his office with competence and dignity. Claudia Roth … has displayed neither.”
Many local papers saw it the same way. “The black cloth on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz is threatening to become a shroud for this art show,” wrote Jens Kleindienst in the Darmstädter Echo. “For not having prevented this, not only the Indonesian curatorial collective is to be blamed, but at least as much the Kassel Documenta management. They must resign, at the latest after the end of the show.”
‘A single failure’: “This hatred, this agitation of Kassel destroy a beautiful dream: That the art show of the year could become a celebration of freedom and understanding,” wrote Kia Vahland in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Some, however, prefer to spread nasty resentment. And others do not prevent this: neither did the Indonesian curatorial collective Ruangrupa intervene, nor the managing director. … It is a single failure.”
THE LEFT’S WEEKEND OF CACOPHONY: This weekend in Erfurt, Thuringia, the Left holds a congress that’s no less than an attempt to salvage the party from becoming irrelevant. A new leadership duo — to be elected Saturday — will have to reconcile different wings of the party which has struggled to make clear where it stands on major issues — from COVID measures to energy policy to its stance vis-à-vis Russia: Leading Linke politicians have said almost anything on these matters, as well the opposite. Good luck with that, as every candidate for chair was already declared incapable or worse by at least one camp.
NEW STATE GOVERNMENTS AHEAD: On Monday, conventions of the Schleswig-Holstein branches of both the CDU and the Greens are likely to back the parties’ coalition agreement to make the former’s Daniel Günther state premier — with a signalling effect beyond Germany’s northernmost state as it was a marriage of choice not necessity: The current camp with the SPD is not the only one thinkable for the Greens. As importantly, the CDU snubbed the FDP, choosing the Greens over what was long seen as the only natural partner.
FROM DÜSSELDORF WITH LOVE: The same coalition has emerged in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the CDU and Greens hold conventions on Saturday to sign off on the program for the new government. State Premier Heindrik Wüst on Tuesday faces a vote of confirmation in the state parliament, where he’s got a comfortable majority.
THANK YOU: To Hans von der Burchard who contributed reporting, our editor Jones Hayden and producer Fiona Lally.
**A message from T&E: The future of Europe depends on energy security. The war in Ukraine has shown that we cannot be dependent on foreign powers for our fuel. But the European Commission wants to entrench our dependence on fossil fuels from Putin and other autocrats. How? By defining gas as a sustainable investment in its Green Taxonomy. This will mean incentivising investment in gas, and, ultimately, reinforcing our dependence on petrostates. It will be bad for the environment, and even worse for our security. It means giving Putin more leverage over Germany and other EU members, even as we promise to support Ukraine with funds and fast-tracked EU membership. On 7 July, MEPs have a chance to strike a blow for freedom, democracy and security by voting against the Green Taxonomy in its current form. Find out more at nogasintaxonomy.eu.**
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