Floods are driving the climate to the center of the German election campaign

With just over two months to go before election day, the devastating floods that swept west Germany this week have catapulted climate change to the heart of the German election campaign.

Most German political parties agreed that global warming was to blame for a catastrophe that left 103 people dead and visited the destruction of cities and towns in two of the country’s most populous states.

This could be of great benefit to the Greens, who even before this week had to make big gains in the September poll. His strongest stance, focused on climate change and mobilizing all state resources to prevent it, has suddenly acquired a new massive urgency.

So far, they have reluctantly refrained from saying “they told you so.” Robert Habeck, the party’s co-leader, did not visit the areas affected by the floods, and told German magazine Spiegel that “baffling politicians only get involved in these situations.”

“It is forbidden to really campaign on a day like today,” he said Thursday when all the damage arose.

But it is clear that the new focus on the dangers of strange weather phenomena and their links to a warming planet could give a major boost to the Greens ’candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock. They could also distract attention from the mistakes that have so far plagued your campaign.

The 40-year-old parliamentarian has been on the ropes recently for inaccuracies in her resume, for alleged plagiarism in a book she published last month and for delaying notification of the party’s extra income in parliament.

“You will definitely be able to earn points with the [Greens’] competition on environmental and climate issues, “Karl-Rudolf Korte, a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told German television.” It gives you a new way to mobilize voters. “

Government spokeswoman Martina Fietz made it clear that authorities see climate change as the main cause of the floods. “In principle, global warming leads to an increase in so-called extreme weather phenomena such as heat waves, heavy rains and storms,” he said. In Germany, the average temperature had already risen two degrees since records began, he said.

On the other hand, the new approach to climate could be complicated for Armin Laschet, candidate for chancellor of the center-right CDU / CSU. As governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to some of Germany’s largest companies, he strongly opposes parts of the green agenda, saying they could jeopardize the country’s status as an industrial power. .

On Thursday, he was caught in the back, losing patience with a TV interviewer when asked if Germany needed to act more aggressively to curb the climate crisis. “Excuse me miss, don’t change your policies just for a day like today,” he said.

Still, he even insisted that Germany should speed up the climate. “We need to walk faster on the path to carbon neutrality,” he said Friday.

Laschet was also able to score an important point about his two rivals, Baerbock and Olaf Scholz, the finance minister and Social Democrat candidate for chancellery. They were on vacation when the floods hit: he didn’t, and he quickly went to visit some of the hardest hit areas.

Laschet promised compensation to the homeless, expressed his sympathy for the victims and their families and thanked the emergency services, in speeches that seemed to show him as an effective crisis manager and “Landesvater “, or father of the nation.

Laschet could gain politically from the new sense of insecurity initiated by the floods, Korte said. “We will have to wait for new crises,” he said, “and we will rely more on people or parties who have the best ideas to protect us from what may come.” This could benefit the CDU / CSU, which has ruled Germany for 50 of the last 70 years, and harm Baerbock, which has no government experience.

If the floods end up having an impact on Germany’s election campaign, it won’t be the first time. Experts say the severe flooding of the Elbe River in August 2002 influenced the outcome of that year’s elections and ensured the victory of Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

He ran to the scene, dressed in rubber boots, wading through the mud and later promising great help to the hardest hit areas. By contrast, rival CDU / CSU candidate Edmund Stoiber did not break his holiday on the island of Juist in the North Sea, and ended up losing.

“I didn’t want to campaign with this natural disaster,” Stoiber later said, though he ended up visiting the flooded areas.

The climate has also influenced politics in recent years. The long dry period that Germany experienced in 2018, with little rain, fields and forests turning brown in the sun, increased the popularity of the Greens and shot their relentless rise at the polls: in November 2018 they were 22% more than 8.9% in the 2017 Bundestag elections.

In May 2019, they won 20.5% in the European Parliament elections, their best national result to date.

While no one wants to do anything political about a crisis, there will be some in the Greens in private in the hope that the impact of the 2018 heat wave may find an echo after the 2021 summer floods .