Ehe’s back, all of a sudden, like he’s never been gone. “It’s the economy, stupid”: The sentence with which a campaign advisor made the Democrat Bill Clinton US President a good thirty years ago was recently considered to be quite outdated. In many Western democracies, populist parties had brought the political dispute to the level of sensitivities. Suddenly it was no longer about the net of the gross, but about moods, especially fears. Liberal-democratic parties also became more and more involved.
That’s changing, at least in Germany, and it’s happening pretty quickly. Until a few weeks ago, the heating law was staged as a kind of culture war, in which well-off heat pumpers wanted to ban the less well-off oil heaters from eating meat and non-gender people, for a few days now almost everyone in the Berlin government district and its summer exclaves has just been talking one more thing: the state of the German economy, the impending recession, the possible migration of industrial companies.
That’s what summer ministerial trips like that of the Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck were all about, in the unusually harmonious coalition meeting on Monday evening, but also in the recent personnel change of the opposition CDU.
Entrepreneurs warn of dangers
The sudden change of mood is driven by at least two motives. One is the realization that the parties of the political center have little to gain from culture wars. The other is looking at the bare numbers. The luck of surviving last winter without a serious economic crash is gradually giving way to concerns that the German economy will no longer be able to get out of the stagnation that was initially perceived as mild.
Entrepreneurs and managers hardly let an encounter with politicians go by without warning of the dangers. After all, the economy is mostly an issue when it’s not doing so well – although it remains unclear at this point whether a recession with full employment due to demographics will affect people as much as previous downturns with high unemployment.
Suddenly, the focus is once more on the Inflation Reduction Act, the cornucopia of tax breaks with which the United States is promoting the establishment of climate-friendly industries of the future. All this has been known for a long time, but for the time being it disappeared behind other German debates. For some time now, the attention of the average interested political audience has been enough for only one topic at a time. And as long as the heaters are on, the future of the industrial nation has to pull the waiting number.
From climate minister to economics minister
Last week, the Green Habeck traveled through the country, first to the south and west, then to the east of the republic. Anyone who observed him experienced the sudden transformation of the head of department primarily responsible for climate into the man who now wants to be Minister of Economics more strongly again – and, after hardening around the heat pump, suddenly looks like the consensus-seeking politician of earlier times.
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