Young voters seem to be afraid of the Green Party, and there is an effective campaign behind it aimed at preserving the fossil fuel status quo.
Scaling up the response: Those who block climate protection have their own methods. Photo: Ardan Fuessmann/imago
After rejection, malice and various sub-types of hatred, we now come to fear. In the run-up to the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony, serious surveys showed that young voters were actually afraid of the Greens: 25 percent in the West, a whopping 30 percent in the East. The emotional value then translated into unprecedented AfD shares among young and first-time voters.
Fear of the Greens – a party that has been looking out of its fence like a frightened deer since the heating disaster, and even before that, the main concern was that someone might think they wanted to offend them. I was moderately surprised. But Vincent August, a sociologist and now visiting professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University, doesn’t find this absurd, but rather logical. “We’ve managed to frame the opposition as a danger,” he says dryly. “This is a classic in conflict studies.”
Framing – in English Frame. Frame Framing is the process by which something is linguistically filled with new meaning. Vincent August studies “ecological conflict”—how climate protection and all those who work for it can be so obviously discredited.
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Last year we did a series on climate saboteurs called “Climate Sabotage.” This brought us closer to a field of study we knew nothing about at the time: “climate saboteurs.” The description of climate saboteurs and how they do it. While classic climate denial still works well in the United States, the German suspects rely more on prevention in small, complex spaces where the public no longer exists, August explains.
Effective narrative patterns
Then the narrative pattern is used for the main campaigns, where everything is already prepared and the groundwork is laid in the German mind – planned economy/socialism, terrorism (“climate RAF”), etc. Or in the case of the aforementioned heating law, the last years – a classic social critique: all the property owners of the republic suddenly turned into penniless oriental pensioners, who own only the modest summerhouses in which they sit.
The fossil fuel front is not sleeping and is expanding
August calls this rhetoric and mechanism “deescalation.” As the climate crisis has expanded and the demands of scientists and activists have grown louder and more urgent, the fossil fuel front has not slept. “In many parts of politics, scaling up is more cost-effective than protecting the climate right now,” August summarizes his argument. Or, to put it another way, protecting the climate is harder on the parties than waving the old anti-green flag that almost everyone recognizes, and in politics, recognition is always a good thing.
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To understand what and who influences the parties, it is probably not enough to mention the names of prominent fossil players as often as possible: INSM, the metallurgical sector, Frank Schäffler, FDP MP, etc. Campaignros and Campaignras are also present in the main institutions of Germany. The top people in the trade unions (see IG BCE) and industry associations want to proclaim what is good and true, but let the specialized departments continue their preventive work.
And perhaps to understand the reverse escalation, you need to remind yourself every day. It is obviously very easy to become resentful of a change in your habitual lifestyle, to the point of fear.
