Dear German friends,
We need to talk. Let us talk about your energy problem which has become ours, your energy problem which has become a geopolitical problem.
Rest assured: this letter is not that of a Frenchwoman who is going to reproach you, once again, for the anti-nuclear nature of your Energiewende, this turning point in energy policy initiated by the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. This letter is that of a European to other Europeans because the problem ofEnergiewende is less its anti-nuclear bias than its positioning contrary to the geopolitical and climatic interests of Europe.
Of course, nothing in the treaties obliges you to consult your partners on your energy policy choices, which falls within the competence of the States. It is in this capacity that you have sovereignly decided to implement this complex political object that is theEnergiewende, as much an energy strategy as an industrial and commercial policy intended to promote the development of new industrial sectors with export aims. At a time when, in the midst of Russian aggression against Ukraine, your government’s Minister for the Environment promises Poland to implement all possible means to thwart Poland’s choice in favor of nuclear power or interferes in Belgium’s decision to postpone the closure of its nuclear reactors, it is moreover worth recalling this point of law which you have made full use of.
The embarrassment that any attentive reader of German energy policy has always felt for fifteen years is less due to what the project said – massive use of renewables, end of nuclear power, energy efficiency – than to what it did not say. In 2017, in my contribution to the fascinating saga that Jean-Pierre Hansen and Jacques Percebois devoted to the history of the construction of electricity in Europe, I noted that “in this policy nourished by paradoxes, forged by the convictions as well as tactics, where is the gas and, subsidiary question, where is the great Russian neighbour? This unsaid is revealing: behind the debates on the abandonment of hard coal and lignite, there is in fact the shadow reach of the Russian bear”. Under cover of anonymity, a keen observer of Franco-German relations explained to one of the authors: “Joschka Fischer [ancien ministre des Affaires étrangères d’Allemagne, membre des Verts, NDLR] is the most courteous and friendly man there is. He only loses his calm on one subject: when people talk to him about the risk of his country’s energy dependence on the Kremlin!” envied in German political and diplomatic circles.
The urgency is to help you get out of the energy impasse
Let’s be clear: your partners have also made energy policy mistakes, starting with France. This is not the time for anathema. We will leave the Moscow trials to Vladimir Putin. The urgency is to help you get out of the energy impasse which condemns us to finance anyone who wants to destroy this model that we have built together for more than sixty years. And the only way out is European. You must carry out, in the energy field, the same aggiornamento that you have just carried out in the field of defense because, as long as Moscow is under the rule of Vladimir Putin, the security of Europe and the credibility of its energy policy will work in one step.
In this respect, what about the visit to Qatar by your Minister of the Economy to secure the gas supply for German industry? The contrast between this solitary approach and the spectacle of the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese leaders brought together by Mario Draghi in Rome on March 18 makes you think. Europe is there, when the former boss of the European Central Bank, whom no one can suspect of wanting to exploit the solidarity of the Union for the benefit of a short-sighted national political agenda, proposes a refoundation of energy policy . This long-stigmatized “Europe of Club Med”, which has paid dearly for its own errors in budgetary policy, knows the price of free-riding behavior in the EU. We must therefore listen to her, in Berlin as elsewhere, when, through the voice of Mario Draghi, who is also dependent on Russian gas, she reminds us that we must “provide European citizens with a European response and not 27 different responses. ”