Until a few months ago, the German government’s Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, was one of the most popular politicians in the country. Half of the Germans today wishes his resignation, according to a recent poll. In between Habeck, who has long been leader of the Green Party, faced a scandal involving a close collaborator of him, but above all he proposed a very unpopular law on heating systems, which has been talked about for weeks in Germany.
Habeck is 53 years old, from 2018 to 2022 he led the Greens together with Annalena Baerbock, the current German Foreign Minister, and in recent years his reputation as a prepared and capable politician had always placed him in the top places of the rankings of the most appreciated. Many had also approved the management of energy supply in the months following the war in Ukraine: in a few months Germany has practically zeroed energy imports from Russia, effectively making itself independent from an energy point of view from a country from which it had obtained 38.1 percent of imported natural gas in 2020. Much of the credit for this transition had been credited to Habeck.
But then, in early May, it emerged that one of his closest collaborators at the economy ministry, Patrick Graichen, had been among the people to nominate the new head of the German Energy Agency (DENA), a ‘independent public agency that deals with projects to zero net pollutant emissions within the terms imposed by the German government and the European Union. Graichen had named his best man, Michael Schäfer, a Green politician and former climate policy officer of the German branch of the WWF, as head of the DENA. After being accused of favoritism, Graichen he resigned e Habeck he had to apologize in turn.
The opposition has made it clear quite explicitly that Graichen’s is just one of the problematic cases that would concern Habeck’s staff. «It’s like a family clan where everyone is related to each other», he defined it for example Mario Czaja, general secretary of the CDU, the main centre-right opposition party.
At the moment no other similar cases have emerged, but in the following days Habeck attracted a lot of other criticisms for having proposed – together with his party – a law that from 2024 would require changing the heating systems that will break with heat pumps, which will be powered at least 65 per cent by renewable energy.
The proposal is very ambitious and aims to intervene in a sector that is still poorly regulated in Germany, as indeed in many other European countries: in two out of three houses the heating is powered by natural gas, a highly polluting fossil fuel, and it is estimated that 15 percent of the emissions produced each year in Germany is due right to the heating systems.
The government had given preliminary approval to the bill in April, and promised to support the measure with huge subsidies: but many aspects of the proposal were not very clear – the liberals of the FDP, in government with the Greens, sent them 113 questions to ask for details and how it works – and at the moment it seems that people who will have to change their heating systems will have to pay several thousand euros more to install a heat pump. The Spiegel he calculated that installing a pump in a condominium of 6 apartments can cost from 38,680 to 78,080 euros, depending on various factors, a price higher than what a normal system would cost.
A survey by German public television indica that about two-thirds of Germans fear that the new law will hit them unsustainably from an economic point of view, while various criticisms have also come from within the Greens. Winfried Kretschmann, Prime Minister of the Greens of the state of Baden-Württemberg, he said to the weekly Time that Habeck is going “too fast”, and that “pragmatism” is needed in politics. A few months ago, Habeck was accused of just the opposite, ie excessive pragmatism, when he negotiated a deal to expand a large coal mine in an abandoned village in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
A spokesman for Habeck he said a Politico that the minister “clarified that he takes criticism seriously and is willing to improve the bill”. In the past, Habeck had specified that the law does not require changing heating systems that work, and which can potentially still work for many years.
At the moment, however, the controversy over the law is continuing, and it is not clear exactly if and when the government will be able to bring the proposal to parliament. In another article it Spiegel He explains, for example, that the majority should talk about it in the next few days, but that there are only a couple of weeks left before the activities of the German parliament are suspended for the summer.