In the summer of 2023, one question looms over the country: How far are we shifting to the right? The heat doesn’t help, quite the opposite. And while the AfD continues to gain approval, CDU leader Merz ignites an irritating brown Bengalo.
Good places to endure the summer: Berlin. While I’m typing in “Chagall”, it’s about 17 degrees in Prenzlauer Berg, some rain is announced for Friday, everything is quite pleasant and bearable. Bad Places To Survive Summer: Death Valley, California. There are around 50 degrees and despite it A man in his early 50s, like he had been doing for over ten years, put on a Darth Vader costume and jogged through the heat. Well, you might say, if he does something like that, climate change can’t be that bad after all!
How is it in Europe? Italy: average. It’s around 30 degrees in Rome right now. The media-savvy Federal Alarm Minister Karl Lauterbach is vacationing there, however, and has become accustomed to highly politicizing the local weather conditions. The minister warned, among other things, that tourism locations were dying, and that an “era” was coming to an end. drama babe
The whining got on the Italians so much that even the Italian Minister of Tourism spoke up. She showed up to the FAZ “irritated”, one is sure “that the Germans will appreciate the vacation in Italy more and more”. What you say, as Minister of Tourism of a furnace: everything in Burrata. Perhaps she remembers Gerhard Schröder, who was outraged by Italian criticism of Germans once preferred Hanover to the Adriatic Sea.
Climate change and the shift to the right
One could shrug off the talk of the heat as a capricious summer slump, but unfortunately the weather is more than a holiday phenomenon. It is becoming the political catalyst of a Germany that has been tanning for weeks. Indication of this are, obviously, the polls of the AfD. In Baden-Württemberg, the AfD now stands at a whopping 19 percent, giving a few uncomfortable cracks to the fantasy of singularizing the AfD as an East German problem.
Germany is shifting to the right and climate change is likely to intensify it. The essence of the right edge is rejection, falling short, an enormous desire for normality. Nobody has put the latter in a nutshell like the AfD with the slogan “Germany, but normal”. Now, after the not so new “New Normal” of the pandemic times, the next normal is already on the horizon, “Newer Normal” so to speak, a world in which we need cold rooms, that ration water and make fossil fuels more expensive. Political changes that go deep into everyday life – again.
For the AfD, climate change is an annually renewed election campaign gift. Right-wing populists are not exactly known as climate protectors, but the AfD cuts a worse figure compared to its brownish sisters in Europe: there are outright deniers of man-made climate change, not just skeptics. And if something isn’t made by humans, it doesn’t have to be prevented by humans either. If a government does it anyway, it’s at the expense of the “people”. Up there against us down here, that old, dull song.
“AfD with substance”
Against this background, the widespread, attempted climate ridicule on the right-hand side is particularly unfunny. “Funny” remarks about every form of climate policy are garnished with the same hysterical laughter Boomer emojis, usually several of the same species. Look how funny it all is! We already had summer then, you are too soft, too hysterical, too green, too stupid. When RTL (transparency note: ntv belongs to this family) broadcast a special program on heat, a Twitter user commented that it was “so transparent”. Presumably because the media and the elites promote the turnaround through… heated debates? “Guys, it’s called summer” commented another with, of course, a slanted laughing face.
So does the heat turn the Germans brown? Will more people soon vote for the AfD? The CDU seems to think so and has decided to copy the right-wing populists. After she called her basic program “Agenda for Germany”, ie AfD, many observers believed it was a somewhat suspicious coincidence, perhaps even a “dog whistle”, a subtle signal to right-wing populist target groups. Annoying misunderstanding!
So that the last person understands where the party is headed, Merz has now made things clear: the CDU wants to be “an alternative for Germany with substance,” he said at a press conference.
Here one put down the dog whistle and ignited a brown Bengalo.
Incidentally, he had made it clear early on that Merz sometimes flirted with the camp of right-wing populist climate change deniers. “No, the world isn’t going to end tomorrow,” he exclaimed recently, combining it with a reference to the fact that you shouldn’t say anything more in the left-hand Twitter bubble.
Is Merz aiming for a GroKo?
With whom should this alternative for Germany actually be able to govern with substance? The AfDmS cannot count on the Greens; The FDP, in turn, scrapes the 5 percent hurdle and is therefore an uncertain cantonist. Even if the Liberals make it into parliament, the CDU will have to struggle – it may also lack the CSU votes, since the sister could be dropped as an ally because of the electoral reform.
So the SPD remains. Although the social components of climate change are known there, they are also reluctant to talk about climate policy because of the diverse links with trade unions, coal miners and the energy industry. In addition, the Social Democrats could argue credibly against right-wing populists who see climate policy as an elite project at the expense of the hard-working people. “It’s a match” would mean something like that on dating apps.
In this respect, the exciting question is not where the CDU is going. It’s as clear as summer now, at least as long as the party doesn’t screw up any important elections and the Merkelians rehearse the uprising. The much more interesting question is: How does the SPD actually find this new, tanned CDU?
Scholz and the people
The chancellor may have an answer at the beginning of the summer break. While Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck is known to believe that popularity is not the goal of his government actions, Olaf Scholz made a remarkably popular sentence at his summer press conference: “Anyone who wants to make climate policy must have the confidence that every single legal regulation will find a majority in a referendum.”
It is not entirely clear what Scholz means by that. But isn’t that, um, a bit…populist?