Swiss Anti-CO2 Vote Blows Back into Germany

June 15, 2021 (EIRNS)—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.

In the European Scientist, Swiss chemical engineer Michel de Rougemont penned a commentary on the referendum entitled “A Nice Democratic Flop for the Climate Urgency,” pointing out that Switzerland is the first country in the world where the citizens themselves had the right to vote on climate-change legislation, and it was voted down. While he wrote that the vote does not mean that more than half the Swiss electorate are climate skeptics,

“the negative vote of the Swiss citizens is rather a sign of distrust: they dislike complex and costly measures that have little prospect for efficacy. They also hate policies consisting of punitive measures and behavioral constraints. But above all, they do not easily accept the climate emergency, as the propaganda keeps harping on, and which the other half of the citizens gullibly adopt. How many times would humankind have become extinct, should all the announced catastrophic urgencies have materialized?”

He concluded that Switzerland should reverse its policy of phasing out nuclear energy, writing, “As we cannot anymore count on neighbors to palliate capacity losses after closing our nuclear power plants, it is now high time to plan for new and better ones.”