The comments in the Fridays for Horsepower group — or any other “climate skeptic” online forum — reflect the anger felt toward young people who have taken issue with virtually every aspect of their parents’ generation: how they travel from A to B, what they buy, how they produce goods and services, what they eat and even what they enjoy.
And it’s hard to escape these critics. They can be found online, in the media and on the street. In Hamburg and Munich, owners of SUVs find notes on their vehicles that say things like, “Your car is too big,” or, “Climate change leaves me feeling cold.” There are also more detailed messages like, “Ever consider taking responsibility for your actions? Or does your ego need such a flashy car?”
To which the recipients of these messages may think, ‘Excuse me? There are people who see the sheer existence of my vehicle as an act of aggression? Aggression is going around and sticking notes on cars!’ At least that’s how many of the motorists who go online to vent their frustrations see it.
A Special Place in Germans’ Hearts
For many people, the climate debate has long since snowballed into all-encompassing questions: How am I allowed to live? How should I live? And who has the right to tell me what to do? Germans might be more amicable to living more sustainably if they didn’t associate this with increasing government interference in people’s daily lives — a touchy subject. Plus, it’s no secret that Germans love their cars. Many still view them as a symbol of freedom. Indeed, most people here treat their vehicles as more than just basic utilitarian machines. It’s unlikely that a threat to, say, oil furnaces would stoke people’s emotions quite as strongly.
But that’s precisely what’s happening with Fridays for Hubraum. More than half a million people have banded together on Facebook in reaction to Fridays for Future, though the two movements are not entirely comparable. Fridays for Horsepower is just a Facebook group, not a series of mass protests on the streets. It only takes a few mouse clicks to join a group like this. Even if every one of the group’s 540,000 members were active and took their cause seriously — and didn’t just join the group for the heck of it — their number would still pale in comparison to the 1.4 million people who took to the streets in Germany for the Fridays for Future protests on Sept. 20. And that was just one day.
But the horsepower aficionados are mostly adults, and unlike many of the Friday demonstrators, they are also eligible to vote. This is why they are taken so seriously.
The controversy surrounding climate protection is unnerving for most political parties. In Berlin, especially among the parties of the grand coalition — which pairs Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) — politicians are afraid of provoking rebellions by outraged citizens like the yellow vest movement that rocked France. After all, that mass movement was sparked by a planned fuel tax increase. The insurgents, many of whom live in impoverished rural areas where there are no trains and only sporadic bus service, were soon joined by right-wing populist protesters.
Alexander Dobrindt, the conservative CSU party whip in the German parliament, the Bundestag, is concerned about a possible backlash: “Anyone who wants to pass the costs of climate protection on to families, commuters and rural areas will inevitably reap protests and increase the risk of a yellow vest movement in Germany,” he says.
Yellow Vests in Germany?
Could that happen here, in the land of the car? The German government coalition hasn’t forgotten the protests against the proposed ban on diesel vehicles in Stuttgart because of fine particle emissions. Could this possibly lead to a yellow vest movement in Germany? It’s not a pretty thought. The German government caved to pressure from the streets — or at least from people who drive a car there.
When the top representatives of the grand coalition recently met for protracted late-night climate negotiations, it was primarily the CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD) who insisted on limiting the introductory price for one ton of CO2. In the end, it was decided that anyone who emitted one ton of CO2 into the atmosphere would, for the time being, only have to pay €10 ($11). An earlier proposal had called for €20, but this was rejected as too high by the CSU. The CSU announced earlier this month it wanted to rethink the matter. The long version of the climate plan could not yet be adopted, party officials said, because they hadn’t had enough time to read the document.
Dobrindt says: “We want and need to win the battle against climate change, but we will only be successful if we work with the population, not against it.” If people are not allowed to speak their minds about environmental protection, he says, “it will create a deep rift in our society.”
The SPD appears similarly concerned about alienating its voter base. Falko Mohrs, a Social Democratic member of the German parliament, says environmental and climate protection are absolutely a must, “but we can’t allow ourselves to leave people in the lurch.”
Mohrs, 35, is well-versed on both sides of the issue. He was a member of the youth delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and he campaigned for climate protection. Before entering the Bundestag in 2017, he worked at VW, most recently as a production coordinator for the Touran and Tiguan models. “The industry has to change too,” he says, “but that’s not possible overnight. It’s particularly important that we, the SPD, take into account the concerns of both sides.”
‘No One Needs to Be Afraid’
It’ll be hard to make both sides happy. The SPD’s transportation expert, Kirsten Lühmann, says her party is facing pressure on two fronts. There are the progressive, environmentally conscious voters who believe the party’s planned climate protection measures don’t go far enough. “It’s difficult to completely satisfy these people,” she says. Then there are large numbers of voters who complain about the SPD’s proposals for higher fuel and heating oil prices.
People in this latter group are wont to write emails or leave comments on Lühmann’s Facebook page. These range from complaints that the entire policy is antisocial to statements from hardliners who contend that climate change is a hoax. “We have a real communication problem here,” Lühmann says, adding that she always tries to make clear to people that reaching a compromise in the fight against global warming would, in fact, lessen the burden on everyday citizens. “No one needs to be afraid,” she says. But whether anyone will take her reassuring message to heart remains to be seen.
She says that the government and parliament must implement new laws quickly to take the wind out of the resistance’s sails. “The political right is trying to do the same thing with climate protection as it did with the refugee issue: It’s seizing upon half-truths and reformulating them into lies,” says Lühmann.
The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), which is traditionally more inclined to represent the interests of motorists than the concerns of climate activists, is trying to distance itself from the Greens and Fridays for Future, but without falling into step with the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) milieu.
FDP leader Christian Lindner has maintained his distance from the Fridays for Horsepower group, which is supported by AfD politicians. “There are climate change deniers, and there are those who exploit climate protection to further socialist ideas. The key positions of the AfD and the Greens are polarizing our country, just like the issue of migration,” says Lindner, who went on to say that it was the task of the FDP “to challenge them both and reach a reasonable middle ground.”
His own reaction to the climate strike, however, has not always been balanced and rational. His remark that climate protection was better left to the “professionals,” rather than children, was considered a blunder, including by members of his own party. Even he admitted to having opened up “a stupid flank” with the statement.
In fact, nearly all political parties are struggling with the climate package, even the Greens, who are expected to use their influence in Germany’s upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat, to make the plans more ambitious. But will they manage to do so — and are they even trying? How disappointed will their clientele be if they fail?
Denialism Equals Votes
Climate change is the defining issue of our time. There are contradictions and conflicts of interest, but it’s easy to take an unequivocally populist line as long as one ignores some disturbing facts. For the AfD, climate policy is a new, hot topic for winning points with voters.
Not surprisingly, the party has happily jumped on the current online initiative. AfD co-leader Jörg Meuthen has nothing but praise for the group: “Fridays for Horsepower is a logical and reasonable reaction to the ideological madness of the environmental activists,” he says.
The new AfD group in the Saxony state parliament endorsed and “welcomed” the “protest movement” with a Facebook post. It has also become a member alongside a number of other party members, including Bundestag co-floor leader Alice Weidel, the party’s designated environmental politician Karsten Hilse and the Bavarian parliamentarian Martin Sichert.
Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/fridays-for-horsepower-german-motorists-oppose-fridays-for-future-a-1290466.html#ref=rss