Merkel Pays Political Price for Shift on Nuclear Power

The New York Times: Europe: Merkel Pays Political Price for Shift on Nuclear Power

BERLIN — Angela Merkel is not known to change her mind quickly. But that is what the chancellor did last week. In the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, which caused radioactive leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Mrs. Merkel temporarily shut down the country’s seven oldest nuclear power plants.

It means that a highly unpopular decision the government made last year to prolong the life of all of its 17 plants by an average of 12 years has been postponed until June while safety checks are carried out.

By then, conservative politicians and the nuclear industry are hoping that the crisis in Japan will be over and public attention in Germany will have moved on to another issue. Perhaps, said analysts, they believed that the government could then continue its support for nuclear energy and keep the plants functioning for many more years.

But Mrs. Merkel, at least for now, seems determined to disappoint them. Sensing the public mood, she said that the nuclear crisis in Japan “had changed everything in Germany.”

In fact, the crisis confirmed Germans’ deep angst, exaggerated or not, regarding anything nuclear. A quarter of Germany’s electricity is generated by nuclear power, relatively small in comparison to other countries. In France, it is more than 75 percent; in Slovakia, 53 percent; in Belgium, 51 percent; and in Ukraine, 48 percent, according to the European Nuclear Society, one of the largest lobbying groups for nuclear science, research and industry in Europe.

Yet in these countries, there have been hardly any anti-nuclear demonstrations in reaction to Japan. In Germany last week, hundreds of such protests took place across the country. And with Mrs. Merkel facing a major election challenge next Sunday in the important state of Baden-Württemberg, where four nuclear power plants are based, opposition parties are planning more anti-nuclear demonstrations.

“This is a big election issue,” said Claudia Kemfert, energy professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. “Maybe the media has exaggerated, suggesting that what happened in Japan could happen in Germany. But the point is that the opposition to anything nuclear is part of the German mentality. It’s cultural. It’s a fear of risk. Few politicians can afford to ignore this mentality.”

This angst about nuclear energy predates the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Indeed, it is a particularly German reverence of nature stemming from the romanticism of the 19th century, says Reinhard Bütikofer, a European Parliament lawmaker and a prominent member of Germany’s Greens.

“Even before the Greens were founded in 1980, the environmental movement was successful not only in mobilizing long haired, radical and tree-hugging factions of opposition-minded people. It was also successful in tapping into conservative feelings,” Mr. Bütikofer said.

The dizzying pace of the West German economy during the 1950s and 1960s had something to do with this. The pollution and industrialization took its toll on rivers, forests and the landscape. Conservatives worried about the destruction of tradition and values, leftists about unchecked capitalism.

But it was two decisions during the 1970s that brought the environmental and anti-nuclear lobbies together in a way that was to make Germany become one of the leaders in Europe of recycling.

The first was to build nuclear power stations in response to the oil price rise of 1973. The second was an agreement by Helmut Schmidt, the former Social Democrat chancellor, to base more U.S. nuclear missiles on West German territory.

“These created the bridge between the peace and environmental movements, which the Greens adopted as their program,” said Ingolfur Blühdorn, a political sociologist in the department of European studies at the University of Bath, in Britain. “In Germany, it is extremely difficult to be an environmentalist without being against nuclear power,” he added.

Mrs. Merkel tried. When she was first elected chancellor in 2005, she established a reputation at home and abroad for supporting the environment, particularly the need to combat climate change. Young voters who were seeking a more modern conservatism joined her Christian Democratic Union party.

Mrs. Merkel, however, said little about nuclear power. She abided by a decision made earlier by her coalition partners, the Social Democrats. When they were in government from 1998 to 2005, they had pushed through a law phasing out all nuclear energy by 2021.

That law shifted public opinion. A little less than half of the public, which was big by German standards, accepted nuclear power because it was going to be phased out relatively soon, according to opinion polls published at the time.

But in 2010, a year after Mrs. Merkel was re-elected, this time in coalition with the pro-business Free Democrats, she did a U-turn on nuclear policy by prolonging the life of the nuclear plants. Nuclear power, she argued, would be a “bridge technology” until renewable energy resources were sufficiently available.

“That decision was unnecessary and a big mistake,” said Mr. Blühdorn from the University of Bath.

Indeed, Mrs. Merkel’s decision was a political gift for the opposition Greens. Disappointed young conservative supporters flocked to that party. The Greens now hover between 16 percent and 18 percent in the opinion polls, their highest position ever. If that support can be sustained, they could be the kingmakers in the 2013 elections.

With Japan, public opinion is now becoming more radical. More than 70 percent of Germans, otherwise regarded as parsimonious, would now be willing to pay €20, or about $28, more a month for their energy if nuclear power was abolished.

“There’s a new momentum,” said Ms. Kemfert from the Hertie School of Governance. “Chancellor Merkel has a lot of explaining to do to voters. She is coming under increasing pressure to phase out nuclear energy soonest. It means finding alternative sources of energy. It will not be easy, cheap or fast.”

Mrs. Merkel knows that. This is why, whether for electoral reasons or not, she warned her own party and the nuclear industry last week that even after the Japan crisis, in Germany there will be no going back to the status quo ante.