GERMANY: Climate Protection Act developments & more – 20th Jun 2024

Hallo from BA! This is the Rorshok Germany Update from the 20th of June twenty twenty four. A quick summary of what's going down in Germany.

We start this episode with the new developments on the Climate Protection Act. Parliament has already passed the amended law. The new environment protection act would eliminate sector goals, which force government ministers to enact direct action plans if their sectors overspent their CO2 budgets.

This new version of the climate protection act is highly controversial and many experts even say it’s unconstitutional. Some of these experts, who are with Deutsche Umwelthilfe DUH, an environmental NGO, the same one that has already won several court cases against the government on this issue, have submitted a report to the president’s office on Monday the 17th. This report argues that the new law is unconstitutional and is urging the president not to sign it.

The new law needs president Frank-Walther Steinmeier to sign it to come into effect. There was a similar case in twenty twenty when he refused to sign a law after the constitutional court had ruled some sections illegal. If the law isn’t signed within one month, the government would still have to follow the old version of the law and enact direct action plans.

Moving on, a major news outlet recently published internal e-mails in which the undersecretary to Bettina Stark-Watzinger, the minister of education, demanded to investigate whether it was possible to cut off the funding to a group of professors who had come out in solidarity of Pro-Palestinian student protests.

The professors had voiced their criticism of university officials and the ministry, who had condemned the protests. Following the publication of the e-mails the undersecretary was fired on Monday the 17th.

Another issue that will most likely cause a public outcry is the demands of IG-Metall, the biggest union in the country. This union represents all workers of the heavy industry and is demanding a wage increase of at least 7 %. The union leadership agreed on their demands and now only the local committees of workers will have to ratify them, but this is just a formality and no changes to the demands are to be expected.

However, the conglomerate of factory owners in the south west have already announced their opposition and said that the wage demands of the union are way too high. So strikes across all heavy industries are expected within the next months.

th of June: 1953

On that date, millions of workers took to the streets, mainly in East Berlin, and demanded an end to the one-party-dictatorship. The party and state leadership resorted to heavy use of repressive violence and even used Soviet tank brigades to put down the unrest. This didn’t help their popularity, and fleeing the country to West Germany became so popular in the following years that ten years later the Inner-German Border or the Berlin Wall was built.

The European Championships began in Germany last Friday the 14th and thousands of people have been crowding the streets of many cities and towns across the country. The opening match between Germany and Scotland was held in Munich and ended in a decisive victory for the home team. On Wednesday, Germany also played Poland to a one to one draw. The German national team has thus qualified for the round of 16. Police are still worried about the threat of terrorism hanging over the competition, but authorities have reassured fans time and again saying that they have everything under control.

In other news, the conservative state government of Bavaria, run by the Christian Social Union, or CSU since nineteen fifty seven, has long stuck to a very restrictive policy on wind turbines. Bavaria follows the 10H rule, meaning that Wind turbines are only allowed to be built outside a radius of at least ten times their height from the next household. 10H-rule also requires consent from the municipalities next to which turbines are to be built. That has kept the numbers of wind turbines in Bavaria extremely low.

Now, the CSU government is realizing the downsides the policy has for them. The government is struggling to build the turbines they want, because the 10H rule also requires consent from the municipalities next to which turbines are to be built. Now, the government of Bavaria is not getting enough municipalities to agree to their wind park plans and only very narrowly and with huge effort managed to win the votes in two municipalities just outside of Munich.

This effective failure, because the originally planned park in this location was supposed to be twice the size it will now be, has caused the government to rethink their commitment to the 10H rule. The abandonment of this rule could mean that Germany’s biggest land state could soon produce much more green energy.

Bundesrat, the legislative committee of German states, a parliament made up of the government leaders of all the German states, has started an initiative to change the laws regarding organ donations. Right now, organs can only be taken from a dead body if the person had expressed their explicit consent during their lifetime. This has huge bureaucratic implications, because there’s no centralized registry of organ donors. There’s only a card that you have to fill out and carry on your person at all times. As a result, Germany has the highest rate of avoidable deaths due to unavailable donor organs in Europe.

The initiative of the government heads of the states now aims to reverse the consent. That would mean that if somebody doesn’t want to donate, they will have to explicitly withdraw their consent. This rule already operates in many other European countries. In twenty twenty three, the Bundestag didn’t pass the draft, but now the states will give it another shot.

On Monday the 10th, Friedrich Merz, the CDU party leader, announced that the CDU wouldn’t cooperate with the BSW, Sarah Wagenknecht’s new party, but on Friday the 14th promptly amended his statement. He said the party wouldn’t collaborate with the BSW, on a national level. However, on state and local levels the CDU doesn't have a choice on who they work with.

The CDU and the BSW, don’t see eye to eye on the issue of Ukraine: The CDU are ardent supporters of Ukraine’s government and want to support them with whatever’s needed, while BSW would rather Ukraine strike a peace deal with Russia. Both parties also disagree on economic topics. On other, more cultural topics, they think very alike. Both are opposed to what they would call “the gender-craze”, meaning, inclusive and gender neutral language.

Malu Dreyer, the social democratic prime minister of Rhineland Palatinate, a small state in the south-west of Germany, has announced her replacement: Alexander Schweitzer, the minister of social affairs. The next elections for the office of prime minister will be in the beginning of twenty twenty 6, in which Schweitzer will probably try to campaign with the advantage of an incumbent. Malu Dreyer was very popular with the constituents, but she says her health can’t keep up with the demands of holding office anymore.

To close off this edition, a new NATO headquarters which will serve to coordinate and distribute aid to Ukraine will be based in the city of Wiesbaden. The facility will have ample storage space to facilitate transport, but other than that, no further details are yet public.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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