Spending the last days in the transnational meeting of the European project “Energycity”, dealing with prediction methods to calculate the efficiency of energy saving methods and in this way contributing to the reduction of CO2 emissions, I happened to have a hotel room next to an election rally event hall.
German politics really have been rocked by the disaster of Fukushima, and the currently ruling conservative party has made a desperate attempt to avoid defeat in the state level elections this weekend by turning away from the up to now highly praised nuclear energy. Annoyingly enough, one minister of the goverment has unintentionally de-masked this move as unadulterated election rally theater. For most of the protesters against the continuation of the use of nuclear energy, this however was nothing new. Many of them deal with this topic since decades already and have had to learn that most politicians can’t be trusted in this context. As the financial profit in the nuclear business is so immense, lobbyism up to now had succeeded to talk at least parts of the political forces into pro-nuclear legislation, leaving the profit for the corporations and risk and follow-up costs for the public. It seems that many of the citizen’s don’t want to follow their revered leaders any more.