How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany

aising his voice above the pounding drums and honking tractors, Lutz Jankus, a city councillor from the far-right Alternative for“They’re rightwing extremists,” he said about Free Saxony, a loose political movement that includes neo-Nazis and skinheads, as his colleagues began to pack up their tent on the side of the square in the centre of Görlitz.

At the marches held in Görlitz, a stronghold of the far right on the Polish border, and other towns across Germany every Monday night, supporters of both parties vent their fury at immigration, coronavirus restrictions and military aid to Ukraine. But one group bears the brunt of the blame. “Our main takeaway is that there’s no widespread green backlash,” said Markus Kollberg, a political scientist at Humboldt University Berlin who co-authored a recent“What we actually find in the data is a very clear polarisation along party lines.”

When Kollberg and his colleagues showed people a list of 40 policies to cut planet-heating pollution, they found AfD voters barely supported four of them, while Green voters wanted them all. “If there’s no prosperity, the AfD does well,” said one young owner of an industrial engineering company, who fears the party’s success will make it harder for businesses to attract workers and investment. “There’s not much industry here, and very little capital.”

For the Greens, who rode a wave of support for climate action to secure a spot in a three-way coalition in 2021, the unpopular policies are a natural consequence of promises to stop extreme weather from growing more violent.killed more than 180 people across the country, every major party except the AfD committed to keeping the planet from heating 1.5C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.

At a public event two years ago, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, appeared to compare a group of radical climate activists to Nazis, a charge “You get the impression that the government is, as we say in Germany, shooting sparrows with cannons,” he said.

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