Person of the week: Robert Habeck
Four mistakes: So he gambled away the chancellor candidacy
By Wolfram Weimer
04/11/2023, 08:25 am
Germany shuts down all nuclear power plants this week. Older Greens cheer, but two-thirds of Germans think that’s a mistake. After the gas levy and heating ban debacles, Robert Habeck continues to lose authority – and messes up his chancellor project for 2025
A year ago, Robert Habeck was Germany’s most popular politician, the Greens achieved poll numbers of 25 percent, well ahead of the SPD and surprisingly close to the Union. Habeck grew into the role of the felt chancellor candidate, Scholz already seemed weak and Merz not so strong. “Habeck 2025” sounded like a promise to many.
Now the picture has reversed. The Greens continue to drop in polls and are now only 15 to 18 percent – behind or at most on par with the SPD, a double-digit number of percentage points behind the Union and just ahead of the AfD. In other words, the Greens have lost every third sympathizer in just one year, and with it the nimbus as the new center-left people’s party. Even in their urban strongholds of Berlin, Frankfurt, Mainz and Darmstadt, they suddenly suffered a series of electoral defeats.
The crash is not least associated with Robert Habeck. While Annalena Baerbock and Cem Özdemir cut pretty good figures in their ministerial posts, Habeck stumbled from one problem to the next. The leadership of the Greens is already whispering that he “just really messed up” his candidacy for chancellor in 2025. There are four things that are currently going wrong with him.
First Habeck makes too many gross technical mistakes in the ministerial office. The chain of bad planning in the Ministry of Economics ranges from the grotesquely failed gas levy to the half-baked heating bans. Habeck’s initiatives are regularly poorly prepared, not coordinated with other ministries, in opposition to business and majority opinion. In the ministry, he fails to mobilize experienced expertise. In Scharnhorststrasse, sentences like: “Habeck surrounds himself with the wrong people in the management circle.” Although he had filled many permanent positions in his ministry at great expense and with new ones, the state secretaries at the top simply lacked professionalism and economic expertise.
In fact, Habeck made three tough, non-business lobbyists state secretaries: Greenpeace boss Jennifer Morgan became climate commissioner, Attac activist Sven Giegold was promoted to state secretary, and so did Patrick Graichen. This ex-director of the renewable energy lobby group “Agora” is supposed to be Habeck’s right-hand man and steer the entire energy transition. Graichen in particular produces more ideological concepts than politics capable of winning a majority. Habeck, as a philosopher himself rather unfamiliar with his subject, lacks economic expertise in the center of power, political bridge builders and professional engineers of power.
Secondly Habeck looks for the wrong opponents. So he worked his way through the political competition for months at the FDP. Christian Linder and Volker Wissing were eagerly portrayed from his environment as the scapegoats of a sluggish traffic light policy. But his actual competitors are not the Liberals, they are the Social Democrats. The SPD has a massive interest in not letting the Greens grow into the new people’s party. And Habeck is deliberately weakened by the Willy Brandt House because he is believed to be a promising competitor for Olaf Scholz.
That’s why SPD party leader Lars Klingbeil likes to publicly snub Habeck’s many “technical errors”. The comrades regularly portray the economics minister as a airbag and a chatterbox: “In the end, it’s not just nice words that count in politics, what matters most is the substance.” SPD faction deputy Dirk Wiese etches: “The Habeck principle works like this: appearances ready for film, technical implementation questionable and in the end the citizen pays for it.” In terms of power politics, the wrongly chosen opposition means that Habeck is perceived by the public as friendly but weak – and in the decisive coalition rounds he faces an alliance of convenience between liberals and social democrats and regularly draws the short straw.
Third Habeck is always winning as a rhetorical tactician and human sympathizer – but strangely weak as an operational strategist. Russia’s war of aggression has plunged Germany into a massive energy crisis. This redefined the political field of action and dramatically weakened the location’s competitive position. Habeck would have to find strategic answers to this, because not only have electricity, gas and oil prices exploded, but the security of supply for the entire industrial location is at stake. Inflation is explosive and a looming recession is threatening millions of German jobs. Forever in energy-intensive factories: Because with the highest energy prices, wages, tax rates and social security contributions in the world, central value chains of the industrial production network are likely to tear and ultimately migrate abroad. In short, Germany as an industrial location is at stake.
As Economics Minister in the wake of Ludwig Erhard, he is ultimately judged by whether he increases or decreases prosperity for everyone. In the long term, he will only be perceived as a successful minister if he strengthens rather than weakens the German economy and bourgeoisie. Habeck, however, decides in daily politics only for climate policy measures, but not for location policy. The impression is created that his policies tend to weaken the German economy, but cannot really help the climate. His set of tools for enforcing the climate change seems strangely yesterday’s bans, regulations and planned economy elements – instead of mobilizing the green change like the USA through incentives. In any case, he found no support among the population with the prohibition policy. So are 79 percent of Germans against its planned oil and gas heating ban.
Fourth Habeck becomes the tragic victim of old ideological rigidities in the Greens. Although he personally belongs to the liberal-minded Realos in his party, he doesn’t dare to really stand up to the left-wing Fundis. He refuses to use domestic gas reserves and makes it difficult to use hydroelectric power. When it comes to the necessary use of German nuclear power plants, he even takes a radical stand against it, like an elderly Gorleben demonstrator. He remains ideologically trapped in the attitudes of an old Green generation. While the majority of Germans and also the new generation of young Greens – up to Greta Thunberg – see nuclear power as a sensible option for combating the climate crisis, Habeck is following the Trittin generation.
As a compromise, Habeck could easily have agreed with the FDP and SPD to continue and phase out operations for two years. But he opted for the Fundi option and thus gave the impression to a wide circle of the population that he would not be suitable as Chancellor of the center after all. In the middle of Russia’s gas war, switching off the last nuclear power plants, which supply ten million Germans with electricity, without any need, meets with widespread incomprehension among the population. His own coalition partner, Christian Lindner, puts it in a nutshell: “The temporary continued operation of the 3 safe nuclear power plants would have three benefits: Physically, we prevent blackouts. Economically, we create capacities that dampen electricity prices. Politically, we are signaling that we are doing everything in our power do.”
Habeck is now pretty much alone with his exit decision: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna reports a global surge in demand for nuclear power plants, with 52 new nuclear power plants currently under construction. In China alone, 13 new nuclear power plants are under construction. But India also relies heavily on nuclear energy and now has 7 new reactors under construction. Small South Korea is building 4 new nuclear power plants., France is investing heavily. According to the IAEA, 28 countries currently want to get into nuclear power, including Germany’s neighbor Poland. Like French President Emmanuel Macron, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi sees nuclear energy as a key in the fight against climate change: “Global climate goals cannot be achieved without nuclear power. Nuclear energy is part of the solution.” Grossi considers Germany’s exit to be a “unique special path” that cannot be scientifically justified in relation to the climate and the two-degree target.
And so the shutdown of the nuclear power plants for Robert Habeck becomes a Pyrrhic victory. The elderly eco-fundis may cheer. But he has the world public and the broad majority of Germans against him. Depending on the survey, between 60 and 80 percent of Germans are against the complete shutdown of nuclear power plants at this point in time. The process is poison for chancellor ambitions, because it will stick to Habeck like a sticker on his forehead until the 2025 federal election: “Chancellorship, no thanks!”