The defeat of the new CO2 law in Switzerland has blown back into Germany as would be expected. Bild Zeitung, the country’s largest circulating tabloid, has an editorial today entitled the “People’s Voice", saying, “The referendum in Switzerland is also a lesson for Germany” and “shows that not everything that is considered a consensus at party conferences and talk shows is also in the population. Not even the hot topic of climate protection....” While referenda are not possible in Germany because of the Basic Law, nonetheless its “citizens are anxiously wondering whether they will soon have to do without their vacation and their car. Whether the state will really give them something back after making gasoline more expensive for the first time.” The editorial warns that after the Swiss vote, “every German politician should ask himself: do they really still know what people think? Or has he long since distanced himself from the will of the voters? It is dangerous to hang the party-political flag in the wind instead of listening to the people’s voice. Otherwise those who are no longer heard will go to the radicals.”
It is interesting to note that in the last weeks the polls show that the Green Party went from a super-high of 30 percent, down to 20 percent while the liberal Free Democratic Party, which is the most anti-Green party and is lucky when it crosses the 5 percent mark, is polling as high as 12 percent. So, politicians are going to think twice, with elections coming up in September, whether trying to out-Green the Green party will be the path to political suicide.
