Can Germany’s economy minister keep the lights on this winter?
That Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister in his recent, pre-ministerial life, wrote a children’s book in which a girl called Emily experiences “how exciting a night-time power cut can be” may yet come back to haunt him.
These days, Habeck is charged with the daunting task of ensuring that the lights do not go out in for real in Europe’s largest economy. And even if Germans have been hoarding candles and camping stoves, just as not so long ago they were doing with toilet paper and pasta, they consider the prospect of a blackout and cold homes to be scary rather than exciting. Reports of people illegally felling trees for fuel have brought back memories of postwar squalor when Berlin’s Tiergarten park was stripped bare as Germans tried to keep warm.
But a blackout is not so unrealistic since Moscow closed down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline more than a week ago. Habeck was in danger of appearing more than a little triumphalist when he remarked to the Bundestag on Thursday, that “we’ve now be independent of Russian gas for a week”; it was not his or Germany’s doing, but Putin’s, that it has reduced Moscow’s leverage on Europe via energy supplies.
While the cutoff may perhaps have helped to ease a little the conscience of many Germans who have felt that every time they turned on the shower they were supporting Russia’s war, more responsibility lies on Habeck’s shoulders right now than any other minister, even Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He must also try to keep the economy going amid gloomy predictions that owing to soaring energy costs and high inflation the country will slide into recession next year.
Bakers in northern Germany on Thursday turned off their lights in protest at the way they had been excluded from the government’s
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