When you are a business owner in Germany, you are not ashamed to appear to an environmentalist. On the contrary, the former “muesli eaters” are now courted by all business circles.
Favored by the German electoral system, which projected them very early on to positions of responsibility in the regions, the ecologists have accumulated experience and govern today to the top of the state. “They learned in the regions to make laws but also compromises”, explains Frank Baasner, the director of the Franco-German Institute of Ludwigsburg. “It’s all the difference with the French ecologists who have remained all these years blocked on the benches of the opposition”, he adds.
An ecology of government
The Ministry of Economy and Climate, in the hands of ecologists, has become the most popular address in Berlin, headed by Robert Habeck, the vice-chancellor but also the heavyweight of the Scholz government. The conservative opposition and the big bosses of industry are full of praise for the energy policy of this ecologist from civil society. “In the past, companies did not need a minister because he did not intervene in economic life. Now, they badly need him to finance and legislate on the transition”, underlines Frank Baasner.
On the strength of their experience, the German Greens are no longer seen as a brake but as a stimulator. The boss of Lufthansa does not miss an opportunity to praise their pragmatism. “Our demands are almost 100% in their program,” said Carsten Spohr, the president of the German airline, during the 2021 election campaign. “Ultimately, we are very close to each other in terms of environmental policy “, he observed.
Responsible partners
Former Siemens boss Joe Kaeser, who left in March 2021, presented the Greens as a force for progress. He had publicly supported the candidacy of Annalena Baerbock, the head of the environmental list, praising her “credibility”. “Her pragmatism is essential. She always keeps ecological aspects in mind. But she is aware that we are an industrial country. She has understood that Germany’s foreign policy is also economic,” he told the newspaper. Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Young and eloquent, the Minister of Foreign Affairs is part of this new generation of pragmatic ecologists who are better trained than the previous one. Joschka Fischer, the son of a pork butcher without a diploma, boasted of having been a taxi driver and used expressions from the counter in the Assembly gallery. Annalena Baerbock expresses herself preciously and ostensibly displays her bourgeois origins and her studies of international law in London.
Ecology and economy go hand in hand
In Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann also demonstrated that ecology was not the enemy of the economy. The former Maoist, accused forty years ago by the right of wanting to “go back to living in the trees”, is today one of the most respected politicians in economic circles.
He achieved the feat of winning a third term in 2021 as minister-president of this Land, the cradle of the German automobile. He is now defending manufacturers as the Conservatives before him had done. But this complicity with the business community does not prevent him from pursuing an environmental policy. The large energy group EnBW, of which the region is a reference shareholder, has become one of the greenest electricity producers in Germany when it was one of the most coal-intensive.