Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised to build back better. Friedrich Merz is promising to rebuild Germany any damn way he can.
One thing is inevitable: One of the world’s most climate-ambitious governments will fall.
In its place will likely rise a successor less focused on the fate of the world than on the fate of the Ruhr and other industrial heartlands as Merz led his center-right Christian Democratic Union to become Germany’s next chancellor.
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And Merz’s message is that green policy has gone too far — a response to both Germany’s industrial woes and the rise of the second-place, climate-denying far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD. Merz even told POLITICO he will decouple the economy and climate ministry, which the Greens currently helm.
