The trials of Robert Habeck: is the world’s most powerful green politician doomed to fail?
This summer, when I visited him in his office in Berlin, the most powerful green politician in the world was at a low point. It was the last day of the parliamentary term and Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice-chancellor, was running half an hour late. When he finally arrived, he pretend-collapsed as he entered the room, dragging his satchel behind him like a frustrated teenager. When I asked how his day had been, he exhaled theatrically and quoted the opening line of the Boomtown Rats song I Don’t Like Mondays: “The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.”
Habeck leads Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and earlier that afternoon one of his core pieces of legislation had been due to be passed by parliament. It would have obliged public authorities, datacentres and businesses to periodically audit their energy use and reduce heat waste. But the opposition had managed to scupper the vote, and now Habeck was heading into the summer recess empty-handed.
Habeck wants the world’s fourthlargest economy to be a global leader in renewable energy, but virtually every new climate measure that he has launched this year has quickly become bogged down. The most vital of these was a law mandating that from 2024, all newly installed heating systems must use a minimum of 65% renewable energy. About half of Germany’s 41m households are heated using natural gas – a fossil fuel whose combustion releases greenhouse gases – and Habeck’s reform promised to cut emissions by 40-50m tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030, significantly more than under old legislation. But when the law was leaked before being published, it was bitterly attacked by the rightwing tabloid Bild and Habeck’s partners in Germany’s ruling coalition government. Then, at the final hurdle, publication
There was no political epiphany in his 20s, which Habeck spent studying Romantic poetry and German philosophy at universities in Freiburg and Hamburg, and Roskilde in Denmark. A university friend, quoted in Stefan Berkholz’s 2021 biography, recalls that he “stayed out of the lowlands of applied politics and preferred to theorise and discuss Foucault, Derrida, Lacan”.
When Habeck finally developed a serious interest in the environment, it was through the act of storytelling. While still a PhD candidate in the late 90s, with a young family to feed – the couple have four children – Habeck and Paluch started to translate poetry and write fiction. Nature, red in tooth and claw, became a central theme: whether in an anthology of verse by Merseyside poet Roger McGough they called Tigerdreams, the bestiary of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, or a novel about wolves returning to western Germany. Their commercially successful crime debut Hauke Haien’s Death (2001) centred on a devastating storm surge, and the follow-up, Scream of the Hyenas (2004), described how German colonial forces in Namibia fatefully drove the Herero and Nama tribes into the waterless Omaheke desert.
When Habeck eventually got into politics, coming up with compelling narratives about the environment and forging compromises with a co-author turned out to be useful skills. The story of how he joined his local Green party is suspiciously neat. In Habeck’s telling, he turned up at a local branch meeting in 2002 merely because he wanted a cycle path outside his home. From this unassuming beginning, his rise was swift. Within two years, Habeck was the chair of the Green party in SchleswigHolstein, an agricultural state of just under 3 million people.
As an outsider within a party marked by factionalism and ideological infighting, he had no qualms about pushing the Greens in a new direction. “Robert encountered a Green party that had no end of policy ideas but couldn’t find majorities to govern,” said Monika Heinold, one of only five Green party members of the state’s parliament at the time. “His goal wasn’t only to turn the Baltic Sea into a protected area, or to close down nuclear power stations. His passion was the idea of transporting the green idea to the heart of German society by meeting people and winning them over through debate.”
Attracting new voters required confounding their expectations. “Conventional politicians will step in front of the camera and say: we are going to do X,” says Astrid Séville, a political scientist at the University of Munich. “Habeck goes on stage and says: I can see why you think we should do Y, but here’s why I think we need to do X.”
In 2009, Habeck and Heinold ran for the state’s parliament as co-leaders and doubled the Greens’ share of the vote. Three years later, they increased their share of the vote again, and Habeck became Schleswig-Holstein’s deputy premier and ministry of energy, agriculture, environment, nature and digitisation.
As a party of the left, in a country where coalition governments are the norm, the fate of the German Greens had long depended on being in partnership with the much larger centreleft Social Democrats. “The SPD’s traditional attitude towards the Greens was: we are the cook, you are the waiter,” said Heinold, who has been the state’s finance minister since 2012. Habeck wanted to change that, even if that meant breaking with the left of his own party. “Robert’s principle was: we have to open up to the middle of society and talk to conservatives and liberals,” Heinold recalled. “That was new for us, but Robert saw it as an opportunity to make the Green party successful.” In 2017, Habeck’s Greens in Schleswig-Holstein formed one of the first so-called “Jamaica” coalitions – green, yellow and black are the colours of the respective parties – with the conservative Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democrats, a socially liberal but fiscally conservative party.
Daniel Günther, the conservative state premier of Schleswig-Holstein, told me that Habeck has a gift for finding “political compromises that allow the opposing parties to save face”. He recalled a deal that Habeck brokered between environmentalists and local fishers that came to be known as the “mussel truce” of 2015. “He could have told the mussel farmers: I don’t care about you and your line of work. But he managed to bring ecological and economic concerns together.”
Habeck’s repositioning of the Schleswig-Holstein Greens became a success story: not just for the Greens, who remain in government there for a third consecutive term, but also for the region. Windfarms were expanded rapidly. In the first half of 2023, its gusty flatlands generated more wind energy than any other part of the country. A German “happiness index” drawn up by researchers at the university of Freiburg since 2011 has Schleswig-Holstein consistently in the top spot.
Buoyed up by his success at home, in 2015, he announced his intention to lead the Green party into the 2017 elections, a bold move for someone who had only held office for three years. Yet transplanting the Habeck project to the German capital proved less straightforward than he expected. “I know some of those in the Berlin headquarters have always looked at what’s going on in the north with a healthy degree of scepticism,” said Heinold. “What is that guy doing? Is he doing it for himself, or for the party?” Habeck ran – and lost, by a sliver. He got a second chance a year later when the co-chair stepped down. In January 2018, he was elected to lead his party alongside Annalena Baerbock, a politician 11 years his junior who is now Germany’s foreign minister.
As co-leader, Habeck tried to shed the Greens’ image as pious scolds. He and Baerbock rewrote the party’s manifesto, reducing to a minimum the use of the words “must” and “mustn’t” and giving it a typically Habeckian title, designed to startle and intrigue rather than explain: Veränderung schafft Halt, “Change anchors us”. Poll numbers improved, and after the Greens’ striking success in the European elections of 2019, when they came second only to Merkel’s conservatives, the idea that Germany could have its first Green chancellor no longer seemed a pipe dream. The Green party decided to field a candidate for chancellor for the first time in its history.
Again, internal suspicion of Habeck’s motives checked his ascent in the party. It was Baerbock, who had joined the Greens as a 25-yearold, who was chosen by members to lead the party into the 2021 elections. Despite somewhat underperforming supporters’ expectations, the Greens still achieved the best result in their history, at 14.8% of the vote, and became kingmakers in the coalition talks that followed.
The three-way coalition that emerged with Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal FDP bore Habeck’s signature in more ways than one: the title of its manifesto – “Daring more progress” – was an echo of his autobiography, Who Dares Begins. While Baerbock was given the post of foreign minister, Habeck became Germany’s deputy leader, in charge of a newly created “super-ministry” combining economic and energy affairs with a climate division that had previously been part of the environment ministry.
This was the moment that Habeck’s whole political career had been building towards. Finally, he had his hands on the levers of power, and could start to reshape Germany’s entire economy and energy infrastructure.And then, within months of his taking office, Russian troops marched into Ukraine, and all those plans had to be put on hold.
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At 8.45 am, on a pitch-black Thursday morning in early 2023, journalists and photographers exited their minivans and stepped uneasily on to the icy surface of Oslo’s Slottsparken, the grounds that surround Norway’s royal palace. Habeck had made a point of walking from his hotel at the bottom of the hill to the Norwegian government’s reception rooms at the top, stomping purposefully through the snow while his bodyguards penguin-shuffled behind. As he stepped on to a stage inside to greet Norway’s president, I noticed he wasn’t wearing leather-soled shoes like everybody else, but hiking boots. At the time, Habeck was at the peak of his powers and could afford a piece of sartorial theatre: look at me, a man with a grip.
This was Habeck’s second trip to Norway in less than a year, a reflection of just how important this nation of 5 million people had become to Ger
many. Four weeks before Habeck’s initial visit to Oslo in 2022, Putin’s invasion had exposed Germany’s dangerous reliance on Russian gas, which accounted for more than half of its natural gas imports. Gas made up just under a third of the country’s overall energy mix: heating people’s homes, and keeping factories churning out the cars, machine parts and chemical products on whose export the German economy relies. Reserve tanks were only a quarter full, a result of Russia having throttled its deliveries in the run-up to the invasion.
Habeck’s rhetorical stock in trade used to be understatement: “We have to liberate ourselves from catastrophic thinking”, he wrote in Who Dares Begins. But the war had helped him discover the uses of hyperbole: “Doubtlessly, an economic meltdown in Germany would have led to an economic apocalypse in Europe,” he told an auditorium of Norwegian business managers on the afternoon of his 2023 trip to Oslo. A pause, and then: “But the economic meltdown hasn’t happened, and it will not.”
The 2022 energy crisis had galvanised Habeck. He had travelled the world to strike new gas import deals, while massively accelerating construction of terminals for importing liquefied gas. These terminals usually take between three and five years to build, but the first was completed in around seven months. By August 2022, Norway had overtaken Russia to become Germany’s biggest gas supplier. By mid November, storage tanks were 100% full, ahead of schedule.
To solve the energy crisis, Habeck not only had to import more gas, but to get Germans to consume less. This was a political gamble. The Greens’ critics paint them as the Verbotspartei, killjoys who want to ban everything from pork sausages to fast cars. Habeck went ahead anyway. On talkshows, at press conferences, on social media, he urged people to have shorter showers and turn down the thermostat before they go to work. Conservative media had a field day. But the message cut through: compared with the annual average of the four preceding years, German consumers in 2022 reduced their use of gas by 12%. “Habeck said to the public: we won’t manage this on our own, we need your help with this. The last government may have fucked up by growing reliant on cheap Russian gas, but you fucked up, too, because you reaped the benefits,” says Bernd Ulrich, a journalist for German broadsheet Die Zeit. “That was a completely new sound. He was the first politician in decades who treated the public like adults.”
Habeck got away with it because voters could see that he was willing to make his own sacrifices, by slaying some of the Greens’ sacred cows. To secure new sources of natural gas, he had bowed in front of the emir of Qatar, a state whose human rights record the Greens have previously condemned. He temporarily reopened mothballed coal plants that his party had campaigned for years to shut down. To build terminals for liquefied natural gas, he had to scrap environmental impact assessments and take on environmental campaigners concerned that the building works could scare off rare porpoises in the Jade Bay. As minister for economic affairs, he also had to greenlight the export of heavy weaponry to Ukraine, a red line for Green politicians of the past. “These weapons that we are sending will kill people,” he said in a tocamera address on 28 April 2022. “But to decide not to would bring a greater guilt upon us.” That month, Habeck’s approval soared.
Habeck didn’t go into government to become a crisis manager, but as we got back into our minivans in Oslo and the motorcade snaked along the North Sea coast, I wondered whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nudged Germany towards becoming the country Habeck wishes it could be.
In the borderlands between Germany and Denmark where Habeck and his family once made their home, the Scandinavian way of life blends into the local culture. A party representing Danish and Frisian minorities sits in the state parliament. The most popular sport here is not football, but handball, and Habeck’s team, Flensburg Handewitt, has more players from the Nordic countries in its squad than from Germany. Habeck describes himself as coming from the “south of the north”: his entire family is fluent in Danish, and he has spoken of how they used to follow Danish traditions such as raising the Dannebrog flag in his garden.
Habeck admires how some of the major Scandinavian parties have managed to rally their countries around environmentalism. The Danes call it faellesskab: a feeling of belonging generated via the joint pursuit of a meaningful goal. The German energy crisis had generated some of this feeling, as the nation realised it was capable of pulling through by pulling together.
While Habeck travelled around Norway in January, his aides in Berlin were hard at work on a law modelled on the Scandinavian example. Northern European countries have pioneered the use of domestic heat pumps, which extract warmth from the outside air or ground before concentrating the heat and transferring it indoors. About 60% of buildings in Norway are heated with such “reverse refrigerators”. In Germany, they are installed in just 3% of buildings, and Habeck’s law mapped out how the country could catch up.
After a couple of hours’ drive, Habeck’s motorcade stopped off in the town of Brevik, where a German company was working on plans to capture carbon in the flue of a cement factory, liquefy the gas and then pump it into porous sandstone under the sea bed 60 miles off the Norwegian coast. This method, known as carbon capture and storage, was effectively banned in Germany in 2012 after environmentalists protested against plans to trial it in Habeck’s home state.
Habeck, however, seemed to be in his element as he waltzed through the falling snow outside the cement factory. In Who Dares Begins, he decries the “eco-fundamentalism” at the heart of the early green movement. It should, he argues, be the Green party’s “historic task” to “shape an epoch of ecological modernity”. With the enthusiasm of a children’s TV presenter, Habeck explained to the audience of journalists and hangers-on that the factory was like a “a gigantic washing machine” that collected CO2 and pumped it “into the depths of the Earth”. Where other Green politicians would have looked on in horror, Habeck was enchanted. “This is the future,” he said, pointing towards the concrete behemoth.
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There are many places where one could seek an explanation for why Habeck’s winning formula unravelled so quickly after this point. One place to start would be with Axel Springer, the German publishing empire that owns Bild, Europe’s largest tabloid.
On 28 February, shortly after Habeck returned from a trip to Stockholm, Bild leaked a draft of his law to ban new gas boilers. “Habeck wants to ban gas and oil heating systems,” the headline shouted. “How the heating hammer hits YOU.” Installing a heat pump costs between €8,000 and €22,000 (£6,900-£19,100), compared with between €7,000 and €11,000 for a new gas boiler – a considerable challenge to many households already facing rising household costs.
Habeck tried to calm the storm, going on television to explain that once the law was fully fleshed out there would be subsidy schemes, that many gas boilers were due to be replaced under current regulations anyway, and like-for-like fossil fuel replacements would hit consumers’ pockets even harder, as gas prices were expected to soar in the coming years.
But the Bild headlines kept coming: “New shock bill for Habeck’s heating hammer”, “Heating hammer is going to smash the welfare state”, “Habeck wants to bring in an energy Stasi!” Other newspapers and politicians started using the phrase “heating hammer”. At state elections in Bremen, the Green vote collapsed. By May, several surveys showed that Habeck was now among the least popular figures in government.
The enmity between Axel Springer, Bild’s publisher, and the green movement goes back to the West Germany student protests of 1968, when longhaired radicals clashed with a stiff and reactionary conservative press. But in many ways, Habeck embodies the values that the Axel Springer media empire likes to champion: someone with an enthusiasm for new technology and startups, but still rooted in local culture, unafraid to use words like “patriotism” and willing to criticise his own side’s moralising tendencies. Nonetheless, Bild jumped at the chance to paint Habeck as a green Maoist on a cargo bike here to force the public to spend their hard-earned cash on environmental fripperies.
Habeck’s less generous critics may say he made it too easy to be painted as a conventional Green politician in the first place. The German Greens’ ultimate orthodoxy is its rejection of nuclear power. It was an anti-nuclear protest movement that swept the Greens into parliament in 1983, and when the party entered government with the Social Democrats in 1998, it struck an agreement to ban the building of new nuclear reactors and gradually phase out existing ones. Since then, the country has stuck to this path, even during the Merkel years, when the Green party was banished to the opposition benches. At the start of Habeck’s first full year in office, all but three nuclear plants in Germany had been switched off. As Germany fretted about blackouts last autumn, there were calls on Habeck to abandon the phase-out. Instead, he postponed the decision, deciding to leave the three remaining plants on the grid as “emergency reserves” over the winter, with their fate to be reassessed in spring 2023.
When I travelled with Habeck to Stockholm in early February, the issue was on everyone’s mind. Sweden was once at the forefront of the anti-nuclear movement, its parliament voting to phase out its power plants in 1980, long before Germany. Since then, it has had second thoughts. At the start of the year, the centre-right government announced its intention to expand nuclear power for the first time in decades. At an early morning press conference, standing alongside the German vicechancellor, Habeck’s Swedish counterpart repeatedly expressed her “great respect” for Germany sticking to its anti-nuclear path. But, she said, to meet climate goals without harming economic growth, “we’ve reached the conclusion that we need both renewables and nuclear power”.
When she finished, Habeck paused for a moment. At this point, a politician from the Greens’ founding generation might have embarked on a lecture about Chornobyl and Fukushima, the problems with nuclear waste storage, or the sector’s awkward reliance on uranium exports from Russia. By contrast, a younger environmentalist may have conceded that nuclear power has not only proven as safe as wind and solar, but that you cannot ignore a technology that emits a fraction of the greenhouse gases spouted by coal and gas plants.
In the past, Habeck might have articulated the arguments for and against, and concluded with a compelling synthesis. Instead, he folded his hands in the way public speakers often do when they want to project certainty, and gave us something he isn’t usually known for: a politician’s answer. Germany would build hydrogen power plants as a back-up for its renewables, not nuclear plants, he said. That decision had been made.
Later that evening, speaking to journalists after dinner, Habeck was less evasive. He argued that new nuclear power stations elsewhere in Europe have taken more than 10 years to construct and would require further subsidies to produce energy at a price that can compete with wind or solar energy. “Germany’s path to renewables is unquestionably more ambitious, but if it works out, it’s more competitive,” he said. “It is something new.”
This was closer to the classic Habeck sound, singing with ambition and adventure: out with the old, in with the new, a bold gamble. But it is a vision he has mainly articulated in off-therecord briefings, and I can only quote it here because I asked him to repeat it in our interview six months later. Even for a gifted storyteller like Habeck, the story of how and why Germany will launch itself into a renewable energy future while simultaneously swapping coal and gas plants with an as-yet-nonexistent network of hydrogen power stations but no nuclear is a difficult one to tell in a way that inspires confidence.
Even if Habeck’s economic arguments against nuclear power are right – and the birthing pains of Sweden’s new pro-nuclear drive over the last nine months suggest they may be – his decision to eventually shut down Germany’s remaining plants may have been a political misstep, because it closed down a window of opportunity. If the nuclear “emergency reserves” weren’t needed, then surely the moment of national crisis has passed. People had been prepared to save gas to avert blackouts; asking them to rip out their boilers to meet carbon reduction targets was a taller order. “In his second year in power, his skill for political decisions that heed the concerns of the majority of citizens somehow fell by the wayside,” said Daniel Günther, the CDU politician. “He’s usually someone who enjoys talking the party base around to his point of view. With the heating law, it felt like he was playing to the gallery.”
Yet Habeck’s difficult year is also a symptom of a broader political crisis. When governments around the globe began to take the climate crisis seriously around a decade ago, they drew up concrete targets to mitigate it. The 2015 Paris Agreement committed its 194 signatories to pursue efforts to limit warming to no more than 1.5C. But governments signed these targets with the implicit promise that they could be met without directly affecting their voters’ livelihoods. Juggling these two promises, timetables began to slip. None of the world’s biggest emitters – China, the US, the EU and India – have reduced emissions sufficiently to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals. Germany is on course to miss its 2030 target of cutting greenhouse emissions by 65%.
Scanning the political landscape in Europe and beyond, there are few politicians who appear willing to address this dilemma with honesty. If Habeck manages to recover from his current low, Die Zeit’s Bernd Ulrich suggested, he could be one. “On a good day, Habeck is a radical realist: as radical in his demands as climate reality requires, and realistic enough to know he has to win people’s support to do anything about it.”
“It’s been quite a hard time for him lately,” said Günther. “Sometimes you want to tell him: come on Robert, why don’t you stay in bed today and give that talkshow a miss. But he gets up and he goes on the talkshow. He would never avoid the argument. He’s tough like that.”
As I sat down in Habeck’s office in July, I wondered how much fight he had left in him. After the failure to pass his bill in parliament that afternoon, and his troubled last few months, it would have been easy for him to lash out at the rightwing media, at his foot-dragging coalition partners, or at the Merkel government, which had kicked the climate action can down the road. But he was in a more reflective mood. He had failed to pause and look at the state the country was in, he said. “The energy crisis, stabilising the economy – these were all extremely urgent. But socially, there is a sense of fatigue from the many crises of the past few years.”
Hopes for a more Nordic Germany, a country rallying around efforts to build a sustainable future, now struck him as far-fetched. “There is an underlying Scandinavian idea that people believe in,” he said. “But that’s easier in smaller countries. If I look north, then I also see the Sweden Democrats who have democracy in their name but are really rightwing populists, and I see Danish Social Democrats who want to extradite Syrians to war-torn Syria.”
He was adamant that Germany was a long way from levels of polarisation seen in the US or France: “If you were to draw a chart with socially divided societies at one end of the scale and societies that value equality and community spirit at the other, then Germany is very much at the community spirit end,” he said. But his idealism was notably restrained. “There’s a risk in telling yourself that the centre will always hold, and we cannot end up as divided as France,” he added. “When I look at recent developments, we cannot lean back and say: it’s completely out of the question that this country could drift apart.”
In his memoir,Habeck cites a line from the French aviator and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: if you want to build a ship, don’t order your people to collect wood, but rather “teach them
to long for the endless immensity of the sea”. Reading that passage again before our interview, I wondered if Habeck had forgotten that principle in his journey from poet to politician. Saint-Exupéry had the wide open sea, Robert Habeck in 2023 has a law that bans you from installing new gas boilers.
He let out another long sigh. “The heat pump was only a part of the ship, maybe the mast, maybe the headsail,” he said. “The open sea would be to be part of a society that doesn’t ruin the future for the next generation. That is the promise of climate-neutral heating.” But what about the people who are less interested in the next generation and want to be better off right now? How do you get those people to join in the boatbuilding?
Habeck’s eyes briefly lit up as he launched into a charming personal story about solar panels on his first family home, but then he checked himself mid-anecdote as he foresaw the Bild headline it might generate. His press officer later supplied me with a quote about tenement buildings being retrofitted with insulating wooden facades, which was too boring to quote here and made him sound like a jaded salesperson rather than a political visionary.
Maybe he had simply got Germany wrong, I suggested. Was this really a startup country with an appetite for adventure, willing to launch itself on a mission to a green future? Wasn’t Germany just deeply culturally conservative? This is a country that for most of the postwar period voted for a conservative party that campaigned on a promise of “no experiments”.
Habeck interrupted before I had finished my question. “Is Germany really so risk-averse, if you look at the history of our economy?” He sat upright as he painted a picture of entrepreneurship stretching back to the pioneers of the coal and steel industry to Germany’s leadership in wind and solar technologies in the early 00s. Building an economy that relied on exporting 50% of your goods abroad, making Germany acutely sensitive to geopolitical turmoil – what was that if not taking risks? “It puzzles me how we can complain about everything being so difficult now and yet we are so complacent about the recent past,” he said. As he talked, frustration hardened into something more like anger. “We’ve started to convince ourselves that we can’t get anything done, that we are too old, that we can’t do it, and that’s just far from reality.”
In mid-September, a couple of months after our interview, Habeck’s heating law went back to parliament amid tumultuous scenes. Opposition delegates predicted the government’s plans would sink the economy and drive pensioners into ruin. Some leftwing politicians said the reduction in carbon emission that it would achieve was so pitiful that it did not constitute meaningful progress.
“That’s precisely the problem,” Habeck said when he stepped on to the speakers’ podium in a dark suit and white shirt. The longer politicians kept on disagreeing over concrete climate measures, the more daunting the issues they were meant to solve became. “Because we are sitting on our hands, the targets keep getting higher and higher.” He brushed away a farright delegate’s attempt to interrupt. Climate-crisis deniers had nothing to add to the debate, he said. That day Habeck won the argument. His law passed by 397 to 275 votes.
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