This is a catch-all slogan: “Everyone is talking about Germany. We talk about the weather. “
Provocative message-itself is the inversion of a title prose by Red Army Faction Ulrike Meinhof, the founder of the terrorist organization (“Everyone is talking about the weather. We don’t”)-was the core of the West German Green Party’s 1990 election campaign, but few people think it is more important than today Catastrophic flooding in western Germany More than two months before the federal election, extreme weather events became the center of national debate.
However, the German Green Party in July 2021 was clearly cautious in linking the climate emergency to weather that has destroyed towns across the country and claimed lives. At least 164 people.
Annalena Baerbock, the candidate for the Green Party’s prime minister, shortened her summer vacation to the disaster-stricken area last week, but refused to travel with the TV crew. Her co-leader Robert Harbeck sent a video message from northern Germany: “It’s time for rescuers, not a politician like me who can only get in the way,” he said.
A representative of the Green Party, Konstantin von Knotts, tweeted a photo of a car collapsed in floods and rubble on Wednesday, criticizing other parties for reluctance to commit to carbon reduction measures, and insisting that he was the only Only the political parties of China can list climate protection as the “first priority”. Within 24 hours, von Knotz deleted and apologized for his “controversial tweet.”
When Baerbock finally spoke in an interview with the news magazine Der Spiegel on Monday, she listed “ambitious climate protection” measures as the third of the three steps required to address this situation: centralized national disaster management systems and Adjust the German design. She insists that cities and waterways that prepare for future floods are equally important.
The strategic thinking hopes that voters will establish their own connection between the increase in abnormal weather events and the prolonged climate crisis.A clear link will allow the Green Party to face allegations of politicizing the disaster before the dead body is found, and to play its role All-Knowing Party, An omniscient gathering.
Although its slogan “We talk about the weather” may touch people’s hearts in 2021, it played a disastrous role among voters in the year of German reunification in 1990. Due to the alliance with the former eastern ecological organization, the Green Party only maintains a presence in the Bundestag.
Since Belbok and Habek took over the leadership of the party in 2018, the Green Party has been working hard to build a party that talks not only about the weather but also about Germany.in Poster event for this election, Launched earlier this month, they have spared no effort to influence voters who are worried that radical policies may harm the economy: “Effective Climate Protection: Ensure Jobs,” and another poster reads “Economy and climate are not in crisis.”
After launching an election campaign in April, the Green Party briefly surpassed Angela Merkel and his designated successor, Amin Rashet’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to top the list, but in recent weeks, the Environmental Party has been Efforts to gain a foothold were hampered by the long public debate about Baerbock’s qualifications and plagiarizing passages from a non-fiction book named after her.
The hope of the Green Party is that the events of last week can change the dynamics of the campaign and ultimately allow candidates to use their advantages. Even so, few Green Party supporters believe that their party can close the 10% gap with the Christian Democrats.
In post-war German history, floods often created or reshaped political careers if these politicians had the levers of power at the time. The decisive handling of the Hamburg floods in 1962 raised the image of Helmut Schmidt, who was then the city’s interior senator and later became Chancellor of Germany. In 2002, the leadership of the current Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder won the victory from the widely expected defeat to conservatives a month later during the flooding of the Oder River.
In a period of national crisis, as the Green Party knows, the opposition can only stand by while the administration is wearing Wellington boots across the flooded plains, hoping that their opponents will shrink in the process rather than rise in the voters’ estimates.
