In this week’s Capital Letter, I took a look at some aspects of the politics of the “race” to net zero (spoiler: not pretty) once net zero really starts to bite.

One thing to watch will be what happens in countries where all the establishment parties have been behind this supposed race. Where will the voters turn, if those parties decide to stay the course and continue to hurtle toward the abyss brave new green economy?

In this connection, I mentioned the rise of a farmers’ party in the Netherlands in response to environmental rules that threaten many Dutch farms. The BBB or BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement) achieved an extraordinary result in elections to the Dutch senate earlier this year. While the BBB is about more than environmental regulations (it seems to be something of a catch-all protest party), the speed and scale of its rise (it became the largest party in the senate, having had no seats before) is striking.

In some ways, it is a similar story in Germany where the far-right AfD has shot up in the polls and is now scoring about 20 percent, about level with the center-left SPD, the largest party in the governing coalition. As with the BBB, the rise of the AfD is about much more than the effects of climate policy, but it does appear that some of the disastrous effect of, one way or another, Merkel’s Energiewende on Germans’ energy bills has had an effect, as has the controversy over heat pumps (more on that below).

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Daniel Johnson takes a more detailed look at what is going on in Germany. The main focus of that Capital Letter was the class divide that could open up as the adverse effects of climate policy hit those in Europe least able to afford it, and/or its impact on industrial employment made itself felt. Johnson, however, makes a strong case that opposition to the excesses (my word, not his) of climate policy is crossing class divides:

In Germany, the Right has a new cause: resistance to the “Green dictatorship” imposed by the centre-Left coalition government. With Europe’s largest economy now in recession, a nation historically allergic to inflation and slumps is abandoning the political establishment in favour of the more radical far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Remarkably, Green policies – including the switch from nuclear to renewable energy, and from diesel to electric cars – have alienated both industrial workers and the middle-class.

The Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seen by many as a puppet of the Greens, his junior coalition partners. This impression of weak leadership has been reinforced by Scholz’s latest proposal to force homeowners to replace gas or oil boilers with heat pumps. The new law, due to come into force next January, is deeply unpopular and already the electoral impact is being felt.

Johnson describes the AfD as follows:

The AfD took off a decade ago as a primarily anti-EU movement, but quickly morphed into a protest party against Muslim immigration. It now represents a broad spectrum from nationalist democrats to neo-Nazis, but has hardened its stance since the invasion of Ukraine to appeal to pro-Putin and anti-war sentiment.

The switch in the AfD’s direction from its early days is, if anything, more dramatic than that. In its original incarnation (when, if I recall correctly, it was known by some as the “professors’ party”), it was not so much anti-EU as opposed to the eurozone bailouts (I wrote about it here in 2014), and had a conservative, free-market orientation. It was founded by Bernd Lucke, an economics professor. Another of the leading members of the party at that time was Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of the Federation of German Industry.

But as Johnson writes, things quickly changed. Turn to Reuters (July 8, 2015):

Bernd Lucke, the economics professor who launched the Alternative for Germany (AfD) two years ago to fight euro zone bailouts, said on Wednesday he would leave the party due to rising xenophobia and pro-Russian sentiment in its ranks.

Something that also concerned Lucke was, Reuters reported, growing public criticism of the United States by AfD members. Henkel left the party at the same time.

Lucke was succeeded by Frauke Petry, a figure primarily of the populist right. She, in turn, left the AfD in 2017, saying that extremist statements made by other party leaders precluded it from exercising “constructive opposition.”

And now here we are.

Johnson:

But what is remarkable about the present AfD surge is that voters are no longer put off by [its] hardliners… The postwar German taboo on anything reminiscent of the far-Right may be weakening. There is no mystery about the anti-Green rage of the property-owning classes and their disillusionment with the centre-Left SPD and centre-Right CDU. After all, the Christian Democrats exist to defend their interests. The new domestic heating law proposed by the Greens will force households to pay between £15,000 and £40,000 to replace gas or oil-fired boilers with heat pumps. In poorer, mainly eastern, regions of Germany, property prices often range from £80,000 to £100,000. So the coalition government’s law would, in effect, halve the value of these homes.

This threat to homeowners comes on top of the huge rise in energy prices since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has fed into anti-war agitation. People worried about unaffordable Green technologies are easily persuaded to support those undermining Western efforts in Ukraine and give Putin hope that the longer the war goes on, the more likely he is to find sympathetic politicians in Europe to end the war and grant him territory. Indeed, the main political beneficiary of the war has been the AfD. In Sonneberg, it campaigned on the slogan: “Against sanctions – cheap gas from Russia.”

But it is not just homeowners and the middle-class. Workers, traditionally Left-wing SPD voters, see Scholz’s coalition as obsessed with climate change and the war, but dangerously out of touch with their concerns: the cost of living, jobs, migration and crime. The AfD have managed to build an effective coalition across class lines.

And so far as the question of jobs is concerned, this is happening before Chinese exports of EVs into Europe start to cause major difficulties for Europe’s incumbent carmakers, not least in Germany, where the auto sector is, directly or indirectly, perhaps the single most important element in the country’s economic success.

And when they do . . .