The big winner of Germany’s election
The victorious conservatives and the surging far-right both support nuclear power.
Germany’s conservatives won the national election on Sunday, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party nearly doubled its share of the vote from the last election to secure a strong second-place finish.
Nuclear energy may be the big winner.
Europe’s largest economy shuttered its last reactors two years ago in what was meant to be an irreversible exit from atomic energy. But surging energy prices and electricity demand are driving calls to revive Germany’s nuclear power industry.
In its party manifesto, the victorious Christian Democratic Union and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, vowed to “stick with the nuclear energy option.” That meant, according to my rough Google translation of the text, researching next-generation reactors and looking into “the resumption of operation of the nuclear power plants that were recently shut down.”
The CDU’s leader and Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said last month he regrets withdrawing from nuclear power.
“We are examining whether we should build these small modular reactors – perhaps together with France,” Merz told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.
In an interview last week on CNBC, Klaus Wiener, a CDU lawmaker in the Bundestag, called the country’s nuclear phaseout “a huge mistake.”
“They were technically sound, they were doing well, and safe – but the government has, for ideological reasons, decided to shut them down,” he said. “We should have used them longer. That would have made a big difference in energy prices and supply.”
Yet Wiener cautioned that turning the shuttered plants back on was unlikely, echoing statements Germany’s biggest utilities made in recent calls with investors.
“Now unfortunately, three years down the road, these nuclear power plants, they can be recovered but that would be very hard,” he said. “It takes three to five years, possibly, and it’ll take a lot of money. If we want to reengage again with nuclear energy, it will not be about this generation of nuclear power plants.”
That the CDU – the party once led by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who oversaw the nuclear exit – is now willing to support atomic energy is a major shift.
A poll taken in 2022 found 53% of Germans opposed quitting nuclear. By the eve of the final shutdowns the following April, 59% said the phaseout was “wrong.”
While it’s likely only a small factor in its sobering rise to power, the AfD – whose ties to neo-Nazis and defenses of the Gestapo proved too radical even for their former political allies in France, though not for Elon Musk or Vice President JD Vance – has long been the lone party representing that majority view. Founded two years after the Fukushima disaster, Germany’s far-right previously stood as the only party in the country to oppose the phaseout pushed by everyone from the center-right that started the shut downs to the center-left and Greens under whose leadership the last plants closed.
Now the AfD is pushing to completely reverse the closures and undo policies that support renewables.
“What our government is doing … they’re destroying – they’re blowing them up – our nuclear plants,” Beatrix von Storch, an AfD member of the Bundestag, said in an interview on Deutsche Welle last month. “We can see our energy is no longer stable. It’s far too expensive.”
Merz has ruled out any coalition government with the AfD. Last month, however, the German parliament narrowly approved a nonbinding resolution Merz put forward to call to turn away more migrants, thanks to support from AfD lawmakers.
The big question now is whether Merz will lower his “firewall” against working with the AfD to bring back nuclear power.
The soundtrack to this edition is an old favorite of mine from over a decade ago. It’s the song “Ich schreib dir ein Buch” by DJ Koze from his all-around incredible album “Amygdala,” and features a haunting vocal sample from the late German singer and actress Hildegard Knef.
The lyrics repeatedly come back to this line: “If I have the courage, I’ll write you a book. Maybe not a masterpiece, more of an attempt.”
In this era of historic uncertainty, I take comfort in such humility.
Signing off from a crisp Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where from my kitchen table I can see the sun is sinking over Staten Island, casting fading layers of peach and pink on the darkening horizon.