Earlier this month, the European Union was due to vote on a law that would ban the sale of combustion engine cars by 2035. But the legislation, which had been months in the making, was stalled by the German government that had initially supported it.
The turnaround was another major disappointment for environmentalists who come from a government that paradoxically includes a green party as a coalition partner.
While it was the liberal Free Democratic Party that pushed for this position within the coalition in order to gain a concession in favor of the auto industry (which it succeeded), this development once again showed how the Greens are struggling for a to push through an adequate climate agenda. in Germany.
Just weeks earlier, the leadership of that same Green Party watched as German police brutally evicted climate protesters trying to prevent the village of Lützerath from being razed to make way for the expansion of a lignite mine.
Worse still, that leadership participated in striking a deal with the coal mine’s owner, energy company RWE, which happens to be Europe’s largest carbon emitter. They claimed the deal was good for the climate as it would supposedly speed up the coal phase-out and thus help meet Germany’s climate targets.
However, studies have shown that this is not the case; if Germany is to meet the 1.5°C temperature rise limit set in the Paris Agreement, which the German government has signed and pledged to abide by, it must stop burning coal within the next two or three years, not in 2030.
Last summer, the Greens also worked to open liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals with a contract term of at least 15 years. The party leadership justified their actions with the “gas shortage” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but many of us environmentalists wondered why we need such long-term gas contracts that extend far beyond the period it takes to expand renewable energy production. expand to meet demand.
Looking at the policies the Green Party supports today, you might think that it lost its way and succumbed to realpolitik when it came to power at the federal level in 2021. But these “Einzelfälle” (isolated cases) – as the party leadership likes to frame them – of deal-making and compromise on the climate agenda are not isolated at all.
Even before the Green Party entered Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, we were used to their leadership making decisions that directly contradicted the party’s own political platform.
In the summer of 2020, for example, I was among the hundreds of protesters who protested against the cutting down of part of a 250-year-old forest in the German state of Hesse to make way for a highway.
While the Green Party was not involved in the decision to build the road, as part of the Hesse state government, it could have blocked the project due to violations of German and EU water law. But it chose not to.
The Green Party’s transport minister in Hesse, Tarek Al-Wazir, justified the decision to proceed with construction by saying it was taken democratically and was not the party’s responsibility.
In fact, there have been quite a few “isolated cases” in the Green Party’s recent history.
It is therefore not surprising that Germany, even with a Green party in power, is nowhere near meeting its plan to cut emissions to meet the 1.5 degree target. According to Wolfgang Lucht, professor of sustainability sciences at Humboldt University, Germany currently plans to emit about two times more CO2 than it can afford within the commitments of the Paris Agreement.
The disappointment and frustration many climate activists feel is hard to describe. Perhaps suffice it to say that after Lützerath, Green Party offices were attacked, occupied and decorated with “traitors” graffiti.
Many climate activists like myself believe that the party’s top leadership has become too pragmatic and has lost sight of their original goals of advancing climate justice. Indeed, it is difficult to see how green party politics in its current form can lead the way in ending Germany’s and the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and taking the radical climate action necessary to avert a climate apocalypse .
The question many of us are asking is whether we should give up green politics, stop voting party and focus our energies on the climate movement, which is not held back by narrow partisan interests and corporate pressures. Some Greens have already made that choice by leaving the party.
But as emotions run high, it’s important to think strategically. If we give up the Green Party, won’t we lose an important tool – one of the few at our disposal – to effect change on a political level? And wouldn’t that play into the hands of the ‘enemy’ – the corporate polluters?
It is clear that green parties are unlikely to follow the same radical agenda as the climate movement. They face harsh dilemmas when in power as they navigate the complexities of policymaking and balance the demands of their constituents with the realities of governing in a coalition.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up and stop pressuring them to keep their election promises. And it doesn’t mean we should close our eyes to the fact that many within the party itself refute making deals with big companies and succumbing to pressure from various lobbies.
Young members of the party, dubbed the “Green Youth”, have spoken out and criticized the leadership for their controversial decisions. They seem rather eager to change the course of the party and were conspicuously present at climate protests, including in Lützerath.
“We wouldn’t be Green Youth if we didn’t push within the party and in parliaments – that’s why we’re taking to the streets,” Luna Afra Evans, the Berlin spokeswoman for the Greens’ youth branch, said in an interview in January, when the organization mobilized its members to protest in Lützerath. She called the deal with RWE “a rotten compromise” and said a “significant part of the Green Party is not behind it”.
Even within the higher ranks of the party, there was open dissension. Member of Parliament Kathrin Henneberger, who ran for a platform to save Lützerath, was the only member of the party to abstain from the vote on the resolution to demolish the village.
“Since Lützerath, the debates have been conducted differently. Many have recognized that when the climate movement draws a red line, it should be taken seriously. Nor should we allow the interests of fossil fuel companies such as RWE to prevail,” she told me in a private conversation.
As much as we are disappointed and frustrated with the Green Party, we must not give up. We must recognize and encourage the potential for radical change from within the party’s own ranks. We must also continue to scrutinize the party’s policies and hold them accountable when they deviate from their own stated environmental goals.
If the climate movement, strong as it was in Germany, continues to build pressure from outside and within the party, chances are we can prevent other “isolated incidents”.
As we battle against the formidable enemy that corporate polluters are, we must learn from them. As the noose around their fossil fuel profits tightens, they have used every tactic and every opportunity to fight back; and they certainly haven’t given up trying to influence global and national politics.
We too must be strategic in our struggle. While I absolutely understand the frustration and have felt it many times myself in recent years, I believe we still have a long way to go before we can achieve real climate action. And until then, we will have to work strategically with all the allies we can get, even if they are sometimes influenced by realpolitik.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.