Mining
Greens plead for de-escalation in Lützerath
View of Garzweiler II. The village of Lützerath is to be excavated to expand the Garzweiler II opencast lignite mine. photo
©Oliver Berg/dpa
The clearance of the village of Lützerath for opencast lignite mining is imminent. According to the Aachen police, it should start on Wednesday or on the following days. A difficult topic for the Greens.
The Greens have warned of a tough confrontation before the planned evacuation of the village of Lützerath in the Rhineland. “I think de-escalation of everyone involved is now the order of the day,” said co-chairman Ricarda Lang on the sidelines of a meeting of the party’s federal executive board in Berlin.
Although the energy company RWE has a legal right here, negotiations have succeeded in ensuring that coal in the Rhenish mining area will end in 2030 and that several villages where people still live will not be excavated, said Lang. “Nevertheless, I understand the people who are demonstrating there now, the frustration and, above all, the pressure for more climate protection,” she added.
The focus should now be on efforts to phase out coal nationwide in Germany by 2030. She pointed out that within the black-green state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) was responsible for the police operation.
Large police rate possible
The energy company RWE wants to tear down Lützerath in the west of North Rhine-Westphalia in order to mine the coal underneath. The land and houses in the village, whose inhabitants no longer live there, now belong to RWE. However, climate protection activists who have announced resistance now live in the remaining premises. They see no need to dig up and burn the coal. A large police operation is therefore expected.
The topics of the two-day retreat of the Greens also include the upcoming state elections in Berlin, Bremen, Hesse and Bavaria this year. The Greens’ top candidate in the Berlin House of Representatives elections in February, Bettina Jarasch, said her goal was “to get the city running again.” To do this, she wants to forge an alliance with business and the trade unions, rebuild the city so that you can get around everywhere without a car, and implement the plans for administrative reform that were drawn up years ago. There is also a lot to do in the schools. Most recently, only the shortage of teachers and buildings were discussed, the question of the quality of education was neglected.
Co-Chairman Omid Nouripour also lashed out against the Berlin SPD and its top candidate, Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey. He said it was wrong to pretend that there were riots and attacks on emergency services only in Berlin on New Year’s Eve. With a view to the general situation in Neukölln, however, one has to ask oneself what “went wrong” in the district in which Giffey had been responsible for many years as district councilor and mayor.
The balance of the Greens after a year of government participation in the traffic light with SPD and FDP rated Lang and Nouripour consistently positive. “We Greens can do crisis and we have led this country through turbulent waters, through a situation that many of us could not have imagined a year ago,” said Lang. The country is not divided, despite attempts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to exploit high energy prices for this purpose. The federal government countered with aid packages.
When asked whether the Greens also wanted to do something better or differently in the future, Nouripour replied: “The central task is what we have managed to do together, not to talk about on the open stage. That is a task for everyone in this coalition.”