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Can Chinawood Win Soft Power for Beijing?
With movie theaters closed all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollywood studios had little reason for celebration over the past year. In business for over a century, Universal Pictures (founded in 1912), Paramount (1912), Warner Bros. (1923), Walt Disney (1923) and Columbia Pictures (1924) now have an extra reason to be concerned. In 2020, China took over Hollywood’s crown as the world’s biggest movie market, with a revenue of $3.2 billion, 84% of which came from domestic sales.
Foreign-Language Entertainment Is Having Its Soft-Power Moment
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Is this new status enough for China? Probably not. New blockbusters will soon rebalance these numbers, but soft power — the ability to seduce people from all over the world through culture — takes time to build up. Soft power also brings lasting income to its country of origin in terms of products and services, like tourism for example. When in 1934, Walt Disney began work on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” other film studio chiefs derided the project as “Disney’s Folly,” since adults, not children, were considered to be primary consumers. These executives forgot that children watch films over and over again and want all the related merchandise. “Snow White” went on to become the first film in history to gross $100 million, selling 400 million tickets from 1937 to 1948.
Welcome to Chinawood
These are just numbers. Disney’s greatest achievement was making his creations into lucrative vehicles of US culture for decades to come. That is what China wants to achieve. It has been taking similar steps ever since farmer-turned-entrepreneur Xu Wenrong began building Hengdian World Studios in the 1990s. Known as Chinawood, it became the largest outdoor film studio in the world and one of China’s biggest domestic tourist attractions, offering historic film sets, a resort hotel and live performances. Marketing itself “China’s tourism and performing arts capital,” Chinawood attracts thousands of TV shows and film productions every year.
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Also, since fewer than 40 foreign films are allowed to take a bite of this massive market due to a strict quota system, Chinawood also houses foreign productions like “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” a Hollywood-Chinawood co-production (these escape quota restrictions), starring the likes of Brendan Fraser and Jet Li, grossed over $400 million worldwide in the first 21 weeks of its release.
Is this enough to make Chinawood a new soft power? The answer is, probably not. Because Chinawood productions face a similar challenge as all the other blockbusters shot in the country, these films often lack creativity, self-criticism, audacity and freedom. Take the recent historical war drama, Guan Hu’s “The Eight Hundred,” for example. The film — at $470 million, 2020’s top-grossing production — pushed China to the number one spot in global box office revenues. However, most of this profit comes from China itself and not international markets. While European and US theaters still struggle to open because of COVID-19, even without the pandemic, it’s hard to say that such productions could help the Chinese film industry overseas.
“The Eight Hundred” was abruptly pulled from a scheduled premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival in 2019 without an explanation. A version shorter by 11 minutes later opened in theaters, with much fewer scenes involving Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces. Besides likely censorship, what may explain the little impact the film had internationally, as the film critic Tony Rayns suggests, is that while avoiding the “rabid China-is-top-dog quality of the Wolf Warrior movies,” its “spirit is resolutely neo-nationalist,” with “all the bombast and jingoism of the current moment.”
Hollywood became an effective soft powerhouse not only because of million-dollar budgets and top-quality products, but also thanks to creative freedom. For instance, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), both masterpieces, were expressly critical of US military intervention in Vietnam. The films are also on the patriotic side, with American values overemphasized. However, by criticizing America’s own culture and politics, the films are far from being hard-power propaganda.
Hard Power Interference
The Communist Party of China (CPP), on the other hand, interferes directly in cultural productions. According to a report by James Tager, PEN America’s deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy, since 2011, the CCP’s Central Committee issued a statement declaring the “urgency for China to strengthen its cultural soft power and global cultural influence.” As Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin write in The Guardian, the party is trying to “reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money” with the aim being to “influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favorable toward China’s Communist Party.”
The official People’s Daily once declared, “we cannot be soft on soft power,” calling for culture must be exported in order to strengthen China’s international stance. Chinawood is part of this effort, which includes $10 billion spent annually on public diplomacy, in contrast with $2 billion allocated by the US Department of State in 2018. Soft power works well when China opens hundreds of Confucius Institutes to spread its language and culture around the world. What doesn’t work is when the same party severely punishes Chinese ethnical minorities, like the Muslim Uighurs facing persecution in Xinjiang.
China already has an important cultural soft power: its art, poetry, painting, sculpture and pottery, from the early imperial dynasties to the 20th century, coveted by museums and collectors around the world. It succeeds because the state hard power doesn’t interfere significantly with it. But when it comes to contemporary culture — films, games, TV shows and apps like Tik Tok — Chinese hard power seems to impose harmful control. That’s not how soft power works. It needs freedom and self-criticism to produce genuine and seductive art.
George Orwell once said that “Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” The phrase also pertains to the arts and the entertainment industry. When President Xi Jinping says that “the stories of China should be well told, voices of China well spread and characteristics of China well explained,” by “well” he probably means “positive.” That is definitely not how one wins soft power for the long term.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
The Texas Crisis: Tilting at Windmills
Sometime last week, cold air escaped from the polar vortex, which usually stays high above the north pole. That icy air then traveled down to wreak havoc across Texas, a state geographically larger than France, bordering Mexico. Its nearly 30 million inhabitants are just starting to realize the scope of the epic infrastructural failure that has led to the entire state being declared a disaster area.
The freezing temperatures have affected power plants, offices, hospitals and homes, killing at least 30 people so far. Major metropolitan cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin are literally frozen. Personally, it was indeed unusual to message colleagues in Europe and Britain to cancel meetings, reporting that three inches of snow had caused power outages in a state known for its energy production. Having spent most of my adult life in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, never would I have imagined my home state of Texas crumbling before my eyes from such a minuscule amount of snow.
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On the ground, people, including myself, have collected and melted snow to flush toilets. Some are resorting to more desperate measures. Those who do have water are being told by local officials to boil before usage. Almost everyone fears their pipes bursting and flooding their homes with freezing water, as has happened to many friends and colleagues. Like others, I have scavenged for wood to burn in our seldom-used fireplace. Fueling stations and grocery shelves have been left empty much like during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and people are sheltering in place for the second time in a year.
While some pundits have tried to frame this as a “once in a century event,” such claims begin to ring hollow after they become so frequently used. Scientists like Judah Cohen argue this is just the latest disaster from the on-going climate crisis.
The Latest Disaster
While snow is indeed rare in central and south Texas, in the northern, rural panhandle, snow is quite normal. Those small northern cities that are closer to Colorado than Mexico have been operating on one of the two national power grids and thus have largely been unaffected by the crisis. In the rest of energy-rich Texas, public utilities have been privatized over the decades, as state Republicans opted for the rest of Texas to operate its own power grid to avoid federal regulation.
Former Texas governor and US secretary of energy, Rick Perry, claimed on Wednesday that “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” One friend of mine, who coincidently works in the oil and gas industry, had to escape his cold, waterless house at midnight with his wife, toddler, and 13-day-old baby. He would certainly disagree with that callous statement.
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On Sunday night, as temperatures dropped to a 30-year record low of -18˚C (0˚F), demand for energy rose, the power grid collapsed because of a lack of weather preparedness, causing widespread outages. These outages caused local water systems to freeze not just because of the cold weather, but due to a lack of electricity to pump the water, leaving nearly half the state without supply. The state then mandated rolling outages to regulate energy — with no clear idea of which communities are being prioritized, how energy is being triaged and when this will end.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has gone on Fox News to blame renewable energy sources — and to attack the proposed Green New Deal favored by progressives — for a crisis caused primarily by the failure of the state to follow national standards to prepare equipment for dangerous weather events. Falsely, Abbott has claimed: “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a state-wide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”
This was echoed by right-wing representatives like Dan Crenshaw. In truth, the crisis was mostly caused by a lack of regulations mandating equipment be prepared for extreme weather as federal guidelines suggest. It was further exacerbated by the fact that Republican lawmakers, in power for the past two decades, refused to participate in the national grid, which could have eased the strain on the state’s system — all to pad the profit margins of private energy companies.
Of course, much colder places in the northern United States and Canada rely on renewable solar and wind energy that has been equipped for cold weather. After blowback showing that most of the failures originated with fossil fuel, gas and nuclear power plants that were not equipped for the weather, Abbott blamed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is led by Republicans he appointed. Meanwhile, right-wing Texas state Senator Ted Cruz left his constituents to fend for themselves as he headed toward Cancun, in Mexico, using Houston police resources to help him get to the airport.
Tim Boyd, mayor of Colorado City, has resigned after posting on Facebook that “No one owes you [or] your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout.” Boyd’s argument relies on the prominent Texas myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. This individualist myth assumed that white settler colonialists did precisely that and survived the wilderness alone at the edge of the American frontier, so you should too. In fact, these settlers often relied upon not just each other but also generations of communal knowledge shared with them by Native Americans.
Ensuring Survival
Ensuring survival during disasters requires a collective approach. This is one of the reasons we humans live in societies — we can do more together than alone. This is something that the current COVID-19 crisis should have taught us. The solution is simple, yet enormous: we must modernize all our systems —health, education and infrastructure. We need to make all utility companies — gas, electric, water, internet, cable, and phones — public. We must not prioritize customers but, rather, people.
Texas is having a rude awakening because of decades of conservative policies that have prioritized private companies and rejected federal regulations that would have made the current crisis more manageable, if not altogether avoidable. Texas, the epitome of right-wing experimentation, has become a failed experiment overnight. Resolving this issue will be complicated because of continued climate change denial and the rejection of facts by right-wing politicians and their cult.
In Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, “Don Quixote,” the fictional errant knight attacks what he perceives to be giants, despite being warned by his squire, Sancho Panza, that they are simply windmills. After Quixote’s failed attack on the windmills, Cervantes writes that “the knight was unable to move, so great was the shock with which he and [his horse] had hit the ground.” With their own attack on wind turbines, Texas Republicans have begun charging at windmills, blaming a small renewable energy sector instead of the destructive policies that created this deadly disaster.
Hopefully, like Don Quixote, who eventually recognizes his madness, the Republican Party will acknowledge its own delusions. Imagining these windmills as socialist giants coming for individual rights will leave us “very much battered indeed,” as Cervantes describes his delusional character who, too, tilted at windmills.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
The Italian Job: Can Mario Draghi Master It?
A political crisis was the last thing Italy needed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet a personal conflict between the leader of Italia Viva, Matteo Renzi, and the previous prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, led to the collapse of the coalition in mid-January. President Sergio Mattarella then commissioned 73-year-old Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank (ECB), to form a technocratic government, which he will preside over as prime minister.
According to Mattarella, it would have been risky to organize early elections during the pandemic. Indeed, new elections would have delayed the fight against the pandemic. In addition, the prospect of a right-wing populist government would also probably have had a negative impact on the financial markets — a risk that had to be avoided in an already challenging situation.
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Draghi is inheriting a difficult situation. In Italy, the health, economic and social crises triggered by the pandemic have exacerbated the country’s enormous structural problems. Italy’s “seven deadly sins” — as Italian economist Carlo Cottarelli called them — are tax evasion, corruption, excessive bureaucracy, an inefficient judicial system, demographic problems, the north-south divide and difficulty in functioning within the eurozone. As a result of the pandemic, gross domestic product (GDP) fell by almost 9% in 2020, public debt rose to around 160% of GDP and more than 400,000 jobs were lost. The inability of the traditional parties to find solutions for the economic problems keeps support for the right-wing populist coalition (Lega, Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia) at almost 50%.
Even though almost all major political forces have declared their intent to cooperate with the Draghi government, the framework of a technocratic government offers the right-wing populists a target. It is quite conceivable that they will accuse Draghi of lacking democratic legitimacy. It will also be a challenge for the new head of government to govern without his own parliamentary majority.
Managing the Health Crisis Without Austerity
The top priority of the new leadership will be to manage the health crisis. This includes speeding up vaccinations and supporting schools and the labor market. This means applying for — and successfully using — funds from the financial assistance plan of the European Union to mitigate the economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The expected €200 billion ($243 billion) or so from this fund could benefit the economic recovery as well as the planned structural reforms in public administration, taxation and the judiciary, which will give the new government more room for maneuver in economic policy.
Unlike the last technocratic government under Mario Monti between 2011 and 2013, the fact that Draghi will not have to enact politically-costly fiscal consolidation with possible negative effects on GDP growth can also be seen as an opportunity. This is mainly due to broad market confidence in Draghi and the fact that his government is operating from the outset under the protective umbrella of the ECB, which will not allow the cost for servicing public debt to rise excessively. The eurozone’s fiscal rules have also been temporarily suspended; this makes it possible to support the economy through fiscal policy measures.
Finally, it should not be forgotten that, despite the structural problems, the Italian economy has many strengths: Italy is one of the most industrialized countries in Europe and the second-largest exporter after Germany. If some obstacles to growth are removed and, for example, credit is released by the Italian banking sector, the pace of recovery could pick up significantly. Draghi’s experience from the finance ministry and in central banking could help him set a decisive course.
Who Will Succeed Mario Draghi?
Nevertheless, given the major challenges facing Draghi’s technocratic government, one should be cautious about expectations. The next general election is less than two and a half years away, and it cannot be ruled out that it will be brought forward. That is very little time to address structural problems that have existed for decades.
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}To avert a victory for the right-wing populists, the new head of government will do everything he can to prevent early parliamentary elections until the current moderate majority in parliament has elected President Mattarella’s successor. The latter’s term ends in February 2022, and it cannot be ruled out that Draghi himself will succeed Mattarella. He could use his authority and power as president to stabilize politics, as is the traditional role of the Italian president.
In 2012, Draghi saved the eurozone as head of Europe’s most important financial institution. In the current crisis, even if supported by figures from across a broad political spectrum, he will act as head of one of Europe’s most politically-fragile governments — an incomparably less favorable starting position.
Draghi will make the best possible use of his time as head of government. That much is certain. However, given the massive level of support for the populists, the most important question is: After Draghi, will someone take the helm who will continue his reforms or reverse them? Not only Italy’s future but also that of the entire eurozone depends on it.
*[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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US makes official return to Paris climate pact
The US is back in the Paris climate accord, just 107 days after it left.While Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders say they expect the US to prove its seriousness after four years of being mostly absent. They are especially keen to hear an announcement from Washington in the coming months on the US’s goal for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2030.The US return to the Paris agreement became official on Friday, almost a month after Joe Biden told the UN that the US intended to rejoin.“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”The president signed an executive order on his first day in office that reversed the withdrawal ordered by his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump.The Trump administration had announced its departure from the Paris accord in 2019 but it did not become effective until 4 November 2020, the day after the election, because of provisions in the agreement.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Thursday the official US re-entry “is itself very important”, as was Biden’s announcement that the US would return to providing climate aid to poorer countries, as promised in 2009.“It’s the political message that is being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief. She was one of the leading forces in hammering out the 2015 mostly voluntary agreement where countries set their own goals to reduce greenhouse gases.One fear was that other countries would follow the US in abandoning the climate fight, but none did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inaction by the Trump administration. US cities, states and businesses still worked to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but without the federal government.“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it is basically the same thing,” Figueres said. “It’s not about how many days. It’s the political symbolism that the largest economy refuses to see the opportunity of addressing climate change. We’ve lost too much time,” Figueres said.The UN Environment Programme director, Inger Andersen, said the US had to prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but she said she had no doubt it would when it submits its required emissions-cutting targets. The Biden administration promises to announce them before a summit in April.“We hope they will translate into a very meaningful reduction of emissions and they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said.More than 120 countries, including the world’s biggest emitter, China, have promised to have net zero carbon emissions around mid-century.The University of Maryland environment professor Nathan Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal, said he expected a 2030 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions between 40% and 50% from the 2005 baseline levels. A longtime international target, included in the Paris accord with an even more stringent goal, is to keep warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels. The world has already warmed about 1.2C since that time. More
- in US Politics
Republican leaders in Texas face growing backlash as power crisis deepens
As Texas struggled on Thursday with a disastrous lack of power, food and water following the deadly storm that brought Arctic temperatures to the southern US, the state’s Republican leadership stood battered by a growing outcry over mismanagement of the power grid and a painfully slow emergency response.Residents huddled at elementary schools in makeshift “warming centers”, moved in with any relatives and friends who have heat – despite the coronavirus risks – or simply held out inside their homes in deteriorating conditions.Some do not have enough water to drink, let alone wash. Others are dealing with flooding from burst pipes, unreliable gas and electricity service and “boil water” notices spreading to additional major cities. And with at least two dozen confirmed deaths in the state since the weekend storm, the National Weather Service announced on Wednesday that a new storm front would likely bring another round of frigid temperatures to Texas and “significant ice accumulations”.The immediate risks for the most vulnerable residents remained exposure, malnourishment and the threat of fires or carbon monoxide poisoning as residents sat inside cars, brought grills indoors, and used fireplaces for the first time in years in an attempt to stay warm.But the state’s Republican governor, nationally elected officials and Republican-led state legislature were dealing separately with a growing backlash at the inability to restore power for days as residents stood in long lines for paltry supplies of groceries and queued for miles for gasoline.A focus of particular wrath on Thursday was Senator Ted Cruz, who was spotted leaving frigid Houston Wednesday on a flight bound for Cancun, Mexico, the popular beach destination south of the border.Cruz “is vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he was elected to represent and serve”, the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who made a strong run against Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018 and then ran for president in the 2020 election, said on MSNBC.O’Rourke blamed decades of Republican leadership in the state for failing to embrace alternative energy and maintain durable energy infrastructure. “There has been complete Republican control of the state of Texas for 20 years,” O’Rourke said.Cruz finally confirmed he had taken the trip and on Thursday afternoon was returning to Houston.In an effort to stay ahead of constituents’ wrath about the power crisis and lack of preparedness or information, the governor, Greg Abbott, announced a full-scale investigation into the state’s standalone energy utility – whose leadership Abbott himself appointed. He also tried to shift the blame for the power grid failure to a supposed failure of windmills, which account for about 7% of power generation in Texas.“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said on Fox News.That was a gross mischaracterization of the power crisis, which Abbott elsewhere admitted was brought on mainly by frozen natural gas pipelines that had knocked power plants offline.“Every source of power Texas has has been compromised,” Abbott said at a news conference on Wednesday.On Thursday at a White House briefing, the press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that weather effects on solar and wind energy in Texas were “the least significant factors” in the disaster.And homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said the dire storms “demonstrate to us that climate change is real and it’s happening now and we’re not adequately prepared for it”.Both the state plants and the pipelines are run by the state utility, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which was set up independent of other states’ grids so that Texas, whose economy is built on the fossil fuels industry, would not be as subject to federal energy regulations.Even with the grid in tatters, the arrangement was worth it, declared former Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican who served as energy secretary under Donald Trump.“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry wrote in a blogpost.Residents might disagree. More than 130 of the state’s 254 counties were experiencing water outages or potential contamination, and more than 250,000 residents had not had water service for three days, according to state data.Store shelves were cleared of food, lines formed at public spigots in parks, firewood was hard to come by and out-of-state plumbers were invited to come work on an epidemic of burst pipes. Hospitals reported oxygen shortages and nursing homes and dialysis centers struggled to stay online.The Texas national guard was deployed across the state to check on residents and move them to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had sent blankets, provisions, generators and fuel “to ensure the continued availability of backup power,” the White House said. Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Texas last Sunday.“We have state leadership – Governor Abbott, Lieutenant Governor [Dan] Patrick – that want to point fingers at everything except the problem,” the San Antonio Democratic politician Julián Castro told MSNBC.Ercot’s chief executive, Bill Magness, asked residents for patience. “I am sure when we review this, we’re going to find things we wish we’d done better,” he said in a televised address.In Houston the emergency recalled the devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the flooding that ensued.But then as now, no elected Republican could be heard to warn that the state must take action to address the climate change emergency. Instead they sent the opposite message.“Bottom line: thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels,” Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican with a growing national profile, tweeted on Wednesday. More
Germany’s Greens Are Within Earshot of Power
In 1983, long-haired MPs wearing knitted sweaters and carrying flowers entered Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. These obscure and humble beginnings of the Greens as an anti-establishment party are long gone from the German political scene. From 1998 to 2005, the party formed a governing coalition with Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats (SPD) on a national level. Since then, the Greens have also carried responsibility in numerous state governments.
The Green Party hasn’t been part of a national government for 16 years now, but it is eager to pick up the reins again. Increased public approval is fueling its craving for power. For about two years now, the Greens’ poll numbers have been hovering around the 20% mark. Compared to the party’s best federal election result yet, 10,7% in 2009, approval has almost doubled. At the pinnacle, in June 2019, some polling agencies projected 27% support for the Greens, pushing the party to the top spot, 3% ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU).
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With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, these approval ratings dipped temporarily as the ruling parties attracted most public attention while applying rigorous measures to combat the virus. Nonetheless, during the last couple of months, the Greens have recovered. The party is a force to be reckoned with during the upcoming September general election. What has prompted these skyrocketing poll numbers?
Rising Stars
In January 2018, two fresh faces entered the national political arena. Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck became joint party leaders for the Greens and have since become rising stars.
Robert Habeck holds a doctorate in philosophy and is the former deputy head of state and environment minister for the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. With his trademark hairdo, three-day stubble and casual clothing, Habeck knows how to stage a good photo opportunity. One of the images that has gone viral on social media is of him ironing his shirt on the wooden floor shortly before attending a party conference. Despite facing ridicule by many, Habeck is apt at setting himself apart from politicians regarded as old school and out of step with young voters.
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Annalena Baerbock, who is a member of the Bundestag, is also no stranger to self-promotion. Her lively personality and vigor contribute to the Greens’ modern public image. However, she distinguishes herself from Habeck by more in-depth policy knowledge. While the more charismatic Habeck tends to indulge in outlining the philosophical and ideological framework of Green politics, Baerbock likes to delve into the policy nitty-gritty, like Germany’s coal phase-out. This makes her a more popular figure within the party, while Habeck enjoys higher approval ratings among voters.
It would be superficial to reduce the Greens’ soaring approval ratings to their party leaders’ public image. Both Baerbock and Habeck have pressed ahead with establishing the party as a socioecological alternative for centrist voters, veering away from a common perception that it could not reach beyond its traditional following. This mainly included educated, middle-aged voters with high incomes living in metropolitan environments.
In an interview, Robert Habeck stated the party’s intent to detach itself from this misconception: “Our goal is not only to be a milieu party. We are now starting a new phase.” The Greens have benefited from climate protection, gradually receiving more public attention due to external events and activism by various groups, like the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Fridays for Future climate movement. With awareness of the issue of global warming increasing, the Greens are succeeding in reaching out to the “middle of society.”
A Green Chancellor?
As their traditional coalition partner, the SPD, is losing popularity, the Greens have been bustling to find new, more conservative political allies. After the 2017 general election, the Greens negotiated with the center-right CDU/CSU and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) to form a government. That was the continuation of the party’s strategic opening to all ends of the political spectrum, as the Greens had already formed coalitions with both parties in several state governments. In 2011, the party had already reached a significant milestone: Winfried Kretschmann won the state election of Baden-Wuerttemberg by appealing to conservative voters and became the first Green minister president, with the mighty CDU/CSU as their junior coalition partner.
But the strategy of electability and reaching out to centrist voters does not come without its repercussions. Luisa Neubauer, the spokeswoman for Fridays for Future, a movement popularized by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, has criticized the Greens for abandoning their ecological core values and for delaying the steps required to combat climate change. Going head to head with the Greens, she asked: “If even the Greens can’t come up with a policy that has the capacity to take on the climate crisis — where else can you start?” The movement has also reprimanded the Greens for supporting the construction of a highway through a forest in the federal state of Hesse.
Another accusation the party leadership faces is its failure to commit to the ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5˚C. Many leading party figures believe Fridays for Future’s radical demands are a hindrance to communicating the cause of climate protection to large parts of the population. Conversely, the movement, which regards itself to be “greener than the Greens,” disdains the party’s soft approach. Nevertheless, the Greens remain imperturbable in their quest to appeal to a broad majority of Germans. Due to consistently high polling numbers, the party intends to select its first-ever candidate for the chancellorship. Thus far, Baerbock and Habeck have resisted media pressure to decide who will challenge the CDU/CSU’s candidate.
To the public eye, this delayed decision makes the Green leadership appear tentative and insecure. Indeed, the party seems unsettled by the consequences of its electoral strategy. Barring the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), all parties in the German Bundestag are courting the Greens. After the election of Armin Laschet as the CDU/CSU’s party leader, an alliance between the Christian Democrats and the Greens as the junior coalition partner remains the most likely path to power. This constellation would facilitate the Greens taking up the federal Ministry of Finance and delivering a budget that sets the course for ecological modernization.
Within Earshot
Preferred coalitions with the SPD and Die Linke (The Left) appear unlikely. Yet as voting behavior becomes increasingly volatile, the Greens must take all possible outcomes into account. That includes coalitions with the SPD and The Left, and the responsibility of holding the chancellorship as the larger party.
The Greens are within earshot of historic electoral success. As Svenja Flaßpöhler, the editor-in-chief chief Philosophie Magazin, says: “Actually I would like to see the Greens enter government participation with courage … There is nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is that we are voted out of office again after four years. I miss this attitude a bit at the moment.”
As shown, the odds are pointing toward success. Climate change has entered mainstream politics and is at the tip of most people’s tongues. Poll numbers are soaring, and the party leaders’ personalities reflect the current zeitgeist. The Greens should not shy away from the challenge of government responsibility. Part of this challenge will undoubtedly be the juggling act of maintaining their credibility as an environmental party while serving the electorate as a whole.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
