The BMWs and Mercs will be banned from the autobahns. People will only have electricity when there is enough of a breeze to keep the windmills turning. And the factories will be on a three-day week, while the airports will be converted into organic farms. Most businesses, and of course conservatives of any sort, will be nervous at the increasingly likely prospect of the Greens taking charge in Berlin later this year. But they shouldn’t be. In fact, they would be a huge improvement on Angela Merkel’s chaotic twilight years.
As she heads towards retirements, Merkel’s legacy is looking very tarnished. The CDU is slumping in the polls. It has made a mess of Covid-19, imposing a botched vaccine procurement programme on the whole of Europe that has come badly unstuck. And her likely successor Armin Laschet is struggling to make any kind of impression. After elections in the autumn, the Green party’s charismatic Robert Habeck looks very likely to lead a ‘traffic light’ coalition made up of his own party, the Social Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats.
Merkel was always the continent’s most overrated leader, her reign characterised by dithering, indecision, and delay
Anyone familiar with the British, or American, version of environmentalism could be forgiven for feeling distinctly uneasy about that.
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