This weekend, voters solidified a long-anticipated shakeup of the German government following a campaign season that focused largely on immigration and Germany’s sluggish economy. As expected, the vote shifted the balance of power sharply right from the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). However, while the CDU came out on top with 28 percent of the vote, the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won an unprecedented (but expected) ~21 percent of the vote. Therefore, the CDU must build a coalition with other mainstream parties to maintain the so-called “firewall” against the far-right.
This shift, coupled with electoral backsliding for the Green Party, means that climate change will likely take a backseat in the new German government. During the campaign, CDU leader Freidrich Merz promised to decouple the economic and climate ministries, focus on economic competitiveness and consumer affordability, and stay on track for the country’s 2045 carbon neutrality targets – a tall order. This message likely resonated with voters given that households face high energy costs due to the transition to renewable energy and the reverberating effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
However, the new US administration will almost certainly complicate Merz’s political balancing act. In his post-victory statement, he emphasized that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”
While Merz, the CDU, and the future coalition government face a challenging domestic and geopolitical environment ahead, they must ensure that efforts to bolster European defense don’t overshadow work to build Germany’s resiliency against climate risks. The recently released Germany’s National Interdisciplinary Climate Risk Assessment, commissioned by the German Federal Foreign Office and the German Federal Ministry of Defence, demonstrates that the climate crisis poses serious risks to Germany’s national security. Notably, the report warns of the “direct and indirect reciprocal effects” among threats related to climate change, Russia, China, cyber, and terrorism, underscoring the systemic nature of climate-related national security challenges.
The Assessment covers five key areas of risk for the German government. These include:
- The converging health, economic, financial, food and work-related risks of extreme weather events;
- The climate-conflict nexus, related food and migration risks, and implications for armed forces;
- The geopolitics, risks, and rewards of related to the energy transition;
- The impact of climate change on great power competition and the world order; and
- The related domestic policy risks for both Germany and the broader European Union.
In short, the Assessment is clear that accelerating climate change and instability have the potential to fuel recruitment to extremist and militant groups, strain already-limited humanitarian and development resources, and interrupt supply chains in ways that “adversely affect the European economy and may cause tensions at domestic political level which ultimately diminish society’s overall resilience.”
In light of the far-right AfD’s historic vote share this weekend, the fifth pillar may be the most urgent in the short term. As the Assessment notes, climate action has been manipulated and weaponized by far-right actors to increase their popular support and cast doubt on European governance. Furthermore, “sections of the right-wing extremist scene have for decades been spreading the narrative that it is not the effects of climate change that are responsible for the challenges being faced by countries of the Global South, but merely overpopulation, destruction of the environment and scarcity of resources.” These narratives threaten European cohesion at a make-or-break moment for climate action as the United States steps back from multilateral commitments, Europe’s Mediterranean states begin to feel the impacts of extreme weather events more acutely, and the EU bloc attempts to lead the green transformation alongside China.
Overall, as Germany reassesses its political priorities and reasserts itself within the European Union, this is an opportunity to show that European security and climate resilience are not a zero-sum game. Instead, Germany (and other EU powers facing rightward shifts of their own) must demonstrate that climate resilience and security are tied, affecting voter priorities like humane and managed human mobility, affordable and available food, and resilience against threats at home and abroad.