TV debate at Anne Will
“Freedom is also defended in the basement” – and when will the economic miracle come?
With the heat pump against the fossil dictatorships, that’s how Bernd Ulrich from the “Zeit” sees it.
© Anne Will / PR
The Chancellor conjures up a climate policy high, a Hessian family company meanwhile sells its climate division to the USA. Is it all just a misunderstanding? An evening between election campaign mode and the question of speed.
While the so-called “heating transition” has been discussed in Germany for weeks, the Hessian family company Viessmann is selling its air conditioning division, including the heat pump business, to the US group Carrier Global. A first sign that Germany is now also losing this connection twelve years after the solar technology flop – or are these investments in the future of Germany, a nation that Chancellor Scholz recently wrote in the forecast booklet for an upcoming economic miracle of unimagined proportions? And doesn’t the whole thing, see Friedrich Merz, still have a little time anyway?
The following guests discussed this in the evening at “Anne Will”:
• Stephan Weil (SPD, Prime Minister of Lower Saxony)
• Franziska Brantner (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection)
• Thorsten Frei (CDU, First Parliamentary Secretary of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group)
• Veronika Grimm (economist, member of the Advisory Council for the Assessment of Overall Economic Development)
• Bernd Ulrich (deputy editor-in-chief “Die Zeit”)
Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil saw things positively with regard to “his” heat pump specialist. Stiebel Eltron, which describes itself as a “responsible sustainability provider”, with its company headquarters in Holzminden in Lower Saxony, has no intention of selling. That’s already a good thing. You have to see the whole thing with the Viessmann deal from both sides anyway: “Conversely, Germans also buy companies abroad.” Thorsten Frei, on the other hand, found that such a process, see the solar fiasco a few years ago, was questionable for Germany as a business location. Franziska Brantner went on with a little more verve, arguing with as much verve as if she had set her rhetorical heat pump to ‘campaign’: This was by no means a “sellout”, rather it is the development of a “transatlantic climate champion” at a pace that “we haven’t seen in 16 years”. One shouldn’t talk about the business location worse than it is, after all everything is “win-win”: If someone brings so much money with them, then that’s positive. Technologies can be advanced faster because it is precisely here, in terms of speed, that Germany has recently weakened badly.
Only fine tuning required
The pace, one of the fundamental aspects in this situation. Also for Veronika Grimm: If growth is to come about, infrastructure is needed, and that’s exactly where you have to become faster, “debureaucratize”, because it’s too tedious in the existing system. She did not want to let it stand that the heating transition law had come too quickly in the course of this. However, aspects such as renovation and living space per person are too narrow, craft capacities must be taken into account, ideally districts should be renovated in order to pool resources in a meaningful way.
Bernd Ullrich from “Zeit” once again raised the history of this energy discussion and the fact that little has been learned from it so far. The trigger was the attack by a “fossil dictatorship”, i.e. Russia, which Germany ultimately helped finance. A misconduct that is now being repeated in a certain way. One pays to Saudi Arabia (“also not exactly suspected of a feminist foreign policy”) and thus finances opponents of democracy again. But one thing should not be ignored: “Freedom is defended in the basement”.
Fight against fossil dictatorship
When asked by Anne Will to explain one of his current articles entitled “Politics for people without people,” Ullrich did so very explicitly. In his opinion, the government is faking a policy that is practically “delivered” to the people, as if it were a construct, a plan – and not the actions of those affected themselves. One thing must be clear: “70 years of normality and stability are over”. The destruction of the environment has also resulted from the way we live. This is exactly what people need to understand: that we can no longer live like this. Instead, however, a kind of “magic decision-making” prevails. If you say things, then somehow they would happen. However, a glance at the figures, such as the number of wind turbines built per day, speaks a different language. Six wind turbines a day? A great thing. If that were the case…
Dear nepotism
Keyword decision magic: The chancellor’s word about the “economic miracle” also has a strange magical effect in this context, a magic word that may become real just by saying it. A rogue who thinks of Kohl’s “flowering landscapes”. Merz’s sentence that the world will not end tomorrow also proved to be a through ball for Ullrich: speed is not a question of democracy. The world has run out of time, for the first time the agenda is no longer open because the clock is ticking. Anyone who slows down now is playing “the piano on people’s concerns”, because: “With every ‘but’ a tree dies”.
A ‘but’ from a completely different direction crossed Anne Will into the penalty area shortly before the final whistle, namely the somewhat crudely incorporated nepotism affair involving Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck and his State Secretary Patrick Graichen. “In a democracy, trust is the most important thing,” said Franziska Brantner as the last general cookie out of the return bag, and she was certain: “The mistake will be healed.” Whatever this could mean …