For the first time, the Greens are meeting again for a party conference in person. Ironically, their own coalition partner brings a contentious issue that moves the Green minds like no other. The crazy thing: the Federal Minister of Economics will have to promote the use of nuclear power beyond 2023.
800 delegates and more than 1000 registered guests come together from Friday to Sunday for the federal delegates' conference in Bonn. This is what the Greens call the federal party conferences and it is the first time since 2019 that this can take place in person. So there will be a big hello in the foreseeable future when party friends see each other again in person for the first time in three years. And something else will be the same as it used to be: there will be arguments about nuclear power again. But this time the situation is more diffuse: because Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck, together with the party leadership, will promote an idea he has come up with: to be allowed to continue using the two remaining nuclear power plants in southern Germany after the turn of the year.
Habeck's plan envisages converting the Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 nuclear power plants into an operational reserve so that they will also be available for emergencies after the turn of the year. The fact that this emergency will occur with a high degree of probability is also due to the massive problems in France with its nuclear power plants that are not ready for operation. Precisely because the French example confirms the green world view of unreliable nuclear power, Germany should continue to generate electricity from fuel rods beyond the nuclear phase-out scheduled for the end of 2022. And it gets even more complicated: if the delegates are to approve the corresponding emergency motion on Friday evening, Habeck has to convince them that continued use is really only limited to these two nuclear power plants and that the chapter on nuclear power in Germany will irrevocably end in spring 2023.
The party's confidence in its economics and climate protection minister is still high. Even if many Greens are rubbing shoulders with the fact that Habeck, in exchange for an early exit from lignite in 2030, allowed RWE to demolish the Lützerath settlement for lignite mining. But trust in the traffic light government as a whole, which the Greens approached with great enthusiasm in autumn and winter, has fallen considerably - especially in the coalition partner FDP. On Monday, after being thrown out of the Lower Saxony state parliament, he vigorously demanded that the third Emsland nuclear power plant, which is still in operation, be transferred to the operational reserve.
"Please rethink," is the friendly reaction of the Greens in official reactions. "Treason!" and "madness", top representatives of the Greens rumble away from cameras and microphones. There is also talk of a "red line". In the emergency application for stretching operation, which was also agreed with Habeck, it says simply: "It is crucial for us that no new fuel elements are procured. They are not required for an operational reserve; new, dangerous nuclear waste is not produced. (...) The Emsland nuclear power plant will finally switched off and dismantled on January 1, 2023... For us it is clear: the nuclear phase-out remains (...)."
How could Habeck step back behind this line, especially since the SPD has so far not shown any wobbling on these issues? An unofficial crisis meeting between Habeck, Finance Minister Christian Lindner and Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday was reportedly fruitless. Factually speaking for an Emsland-Aus, the fact that the fuel rods there are already as good as burned out according to the official announcement and could hardly make a contribution even in stretched operation after the turn of the year - certainly not to network stability, because that is not endangered in northern Germany. The FDP argument that every kilowatt of electricity that is not produced from expensive gas takes price pressure off the market is unlikely to apply in view of the reduced and time-limited contribution that the Emsland nuclear power plant can make beyond New Year's Eve.
"It's not politics, it's physics," Lindner reiterated his call for further steps to secure the power supply in the coming winter on Tuesday evening. That's the ultimate sign of distrust. Lindner is finance minister, but thinks he knows better than his colleague Habeck, who is responsible for the subject and who presented the results of a network operator stress test in September to justify his idea of a nuclear power plant reserve. When Habeck says that Emsland doesn't need it and Lindner says that Habeck makes decisions based solely on ideology and party tactics, at least one of the two is being disingenuous.
The Greens and the Federal Ministry of Economics accuse Lindner of refusing to sign a bill that he had promised to sign, which endangers the operational reserve as a whole because the operators of Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 would have to prepare the operational reserve as soon as possible. Lindner could therefore make it impossible to use the nuclear power plant beyond the turn of the year due to the delays that occur. But the FDP leader does not believe this representation. As I said: The distrust within the traffic light is great. And so, at traffic lights, one rubs oneself more against the adversary in one's own bed than against the opposition. In this respect, the tripartite alliance, which is not even a year old, is surprisingly early in resemblance to the grand coalition, from which the governing parties actually wanted to differ.
At least the story spread by the FDP and SPD is questionable, according to which it would be tactically easier for Habeck to sell the party congress delegates the stretching operation of two instead of three nuclear power plants at the weekend. At least those who are convinced of their convictions among the Greens are demanding with their own motions that the nuclear phase-out be adhered to at the turn of the year. There are no indications that these applications will be successful. The party, which is self-confident in view of its consistently good poll numbers, would probably have swallowed the third toad Emsland if its "Robert" had asked it to do so.
In the new constellation since the Lower Saxony elections, however, a vote for the emergency application for stretching means that Habeck has backed Lindner's demands for more nuclear power. Voting for nuclear power, but then really burying it in the spring of 2023: That is the promise with which the purely themed party conference without personnel elections gets a proper flourish at the start. Habeck will thank Lindner, even if not within earshot of the chief liberal. The two, it is said, practically do not speak to each other.
