[Tanada]

Local election results a blow to German coalition

After key regional elections on Sunday in Germany conservatives and right-wing populists are celebrating.

But the results are a blow for all three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz' left-wing-led national coalition. The ramifications will be felt across Germany.

A quarter of voters were able to go to the polls in regional elections in two of Germany's largest and wealthiest states, Bavaria and Hesse.

In both regions, conservative and right-wing populist parties used the election campaign to bash Olaf Scholz' national government over migration and energy policy. It paid off.

In Hesse, according to initial predictions, the conservative incumbent CDU scored 34.5% of the vote, a substantial gain on its solid win last time.

The far-right AfD also upped its previous score by a couple of percent to a predicted 18%, which would be the AfD's highest score in a western German state election and put the party in second place.

All three parties in Scholz' national coalition have slipped a couple of percentage points, with both the Greens and Olaf Scholz's centre-left SPD at around 15%, and the free-market liberal FDP hovering at 4.9% and may miss the 5% threshold to stay in parliament.

In Bavaria the incumbent conservative CSU, who have led the regional government almost continually since 1946, won the most votes. Although with only 36.7%, according to predicted results, it's the party's worst result since 1958.

BBC

[theluckycountry]

Germany’s Coal Conundrum

Oct 27, 2023 | Dateline Washington

Despite ongoing talk across Europe about weaning off coal, European coal-generated power production grew by around 9% in September. With winter cold approaching and Europe’s energy crisis far from over, that growth may well continue, and Germany, specifically, is once again turning to its coal fleet as an energy security failsafe. Germany’s cabinet has decided, for the second year running, to bring several mothballed coal plants back online to buttress the rest of the nation’s coal fleet to replace scarce natural gas and moderate prices during periods of peak demand. Germany’s ongoing energy crisis has entered a new phase. Concern is less about will there be physical gas shortages but rather the extraordinary cost of gas and electricity prices and the related economic impacts.

While European gas and electricity prices have come down from their peaks during the height of the energy crisis, thanks largely to cratering demand, prices remain bitingly high. Wholesale electricity prices are more than triple what they averaged between 2010 and 2020.

And these high prices have walloped German industry. In little more than a year, the German economy has gone from powerhouse to slug. Germany is now the world’s worst-performing major developed economy with the expectation that years of growth will be replaced by at least a year of economic contraction.

Picking the Wrong Bridge

German energy policy, which embraced cheap Russian gas in lieu of existing coal and nuclear capacity, created an extraordinary economic vulnerability.

In Germany’s race to an idealized green future, it simply picked the wrong bridge with disastrous consequences. How different German and European energy security would have been if they had prioritized dispatchable fuel diversity, using some of the world’s newest and cleanest coal capacity, instead of prematurely closing it and binging on Russian gas.

Coal rose to the occasion during Germany’s hour of need, at times meeting nearly half of German power demand last winter. But the country seems determined once again to abandon energy pragmatism.

The Germans remain committed to completely phasing out their coal fleet by 2035, with significant retirements coming much sooner. Astonishingly, they have proposed building 25 GW of natural gas generating capacity in its place to backstop renewable intermittency. Instead of working to disentangle themselves from the volatility and energy insecurity of global gas markets, the Germans are proposing to deepen their reliance.

Germany is already facing deindustrialization from a year and a half of sky-high energy prices with energy-intensive manufacturers shuttering or openly talking of relocating. And now the policy path forward seems to promise more pain.

American policymakers must learn from Germany’s ongoing energy missteps. Energy security and affordability, underpinned by dispatchable fuel diversity, cannot be taken for granted. Or, worse yet, torpedoed by extraordinary short-sightedness and environmental zealotry.

Through its own policy miscalculations, the U.S. is racing towards energy supply shortages, overreliance on natural gas for dispatchable power and price shocks that could freeze any efforts to re-shore industry and rebuild our manufacturing base.

The stakes are enormous. Just ask German industry.

Conor Bernstein is a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, the industry’s trade group based in Washington, D.C.

https://www.coalage.com/dateline-washin ... conundrum/

[Newfie]

I wonder how ling before Germany turns back to nuclear?

Some mighty hard heads over there.

[careinke]

I wonder how ling before Germany turns back to nuclear?

Some mighty hard heads over there.

Hopefully soon.

Peace

[theluckycountry]

They have a lot of problems the Germans do.

Majority Support For Muslim Migration Ban As 3 In 4 Germans Say Newcomers Hate Western Society
https://rmx.news/germany/majority-suppo ... n-society/

It's a joke. If they had put it to a referendum years ago they would have been banned. The problem is the laws introduced after WWII to allow refugees easy access are still on the books (from memory) Those laws were for people displaced by the war, and fair enough too. But this new influx of Arabs muslims, as we all know, has destroyed Germany. It has to have been planned though, this destruction.

All those governments are not that stupid, they must have gotten orders from the OECD or some superior body. I know people write that off as conspiracy theory but there are just too many "coincidences". Like the two party system in nearly all nations. The walking in lockstep around covid, the lockstep around gun laws, around the VAT or GST (Aust) or whatever it's called in other countries, A 10% or so tax across the board on all purchases. That all came in at around the same time. Then there was the worldwide abandonment of government services in favor of privatization which has destroyed many utilities etc.

Now this is all in the West mind you, not in China or Russia or Switzerland... So getting back to the insane immigration policies, that are in place in the US as well, you have to ask yourself why? So why pursue a policy that will deliberately destroy the cohesion of your society, increase crime, increase dependence on Government (for a solution)?