Europe | Green fades to brown

Costly climate rules are turning Germans away from the Greens

The enviros are now less popular than the far-right Alternative for Germany

Robert Habeck, German Green Party
Image: dpa
|Berlin

“Green is getting too Brown,” moaned the graffiti in Germany’s capital late last year. The scribblers were hard-line environmentalists. Their gripe was that the Greens, one of three parties in Germany’s ruling Ampel or “traffic light” coalition, were going soft. By agreeing to crank up coal power to replace lost imports of Russian gas, and to delay by six months the long-planned shutdown of Germany’s last three nuclear plants, the Greens had bent so far right they were shading into a colour that Germans link not just with grubbiness but with fascism.

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This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Green fades to brown”

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