German Green Party Backers Miffed By Deal With 'Big Coal'

There has been much dismay over the Green Party leadership's compromise with “big coal” that led to the demolition of the village of Lützerath. Will this drive the environmentalist party to breaking point? Jens Thurau reported for Deutsche Welle.

Photo Insert: Climate activists argue that the deal the German government struck with energy giant, RWE simply means that the emissions have been brought forward.

After losing the battle for the little village of Lützerath, many Green Party supporters are feeling betrayed.

Climate activists fought hard to prevent the demolition of the village in the lignite mining area in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), but despite international support, police evacuated them by force and the expansion of the opencast lignite mine is going ahead.

Among those disappointed is Luisa Neubauer, leader of the "Fridays for Future" climate movement in Germany. "I don't know if the Green Party leadership is aware of what it has done," she told public broadcaster ARD.

Neubauer is herself a member of the Greens and now she fears that many members may turn away.

The Green Party is part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left coalition but is also in government with the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state. At both the federal level and in NRW, the Greens control the economy ministry.

In October 2022, federal Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) and the North Rhine-Westphalian Economy Minister Mona Neubaur (Greens) struck a deal with energy giant RWE to phase out coal by 2030, eight years earlier than planned, sparing five villages from demolition — but in return to allow the Garzweiler open-cast mine to expand and mine the coal below Lützerath.

Climate activists argue that the deal simply means that the emissions have been brought forward.

The "deal negotiated with the energy company RWE threatens to break with the principles of our party," 2,000 Green Party members wrote in an open letter to Habeck and Neubaur.

"We are also breaking with the Paris climate agreement, the government's coalition agreement and are losing the last bit of trust from the climate justice movement."

This dramatic appeal led Green Party leader Ricarda Lang to defend the RWE deal once again: "If we don't make compromises, then nothing at all would happen in climate protection," she claimed. "Very few other parties have a serious interest in this."

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