The 2021 German elections has shown that being conservative means conserving the values of our planet, so people still want to vote for conservative parties while taking a stand on climate protection, said Wiebke Winter, board member of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and co-founder of Klima Union during the KLíMA – Green Policy Minutes podcast.

The CDU board member said that although the coronavirus epidemic received a lot of publicity, the issue of climate change continued to be of highest concern to voters during the 2021 German parliamentary elections, mainly due to the floods that claimed many lives this year. Although it has been a central theme for the Greens so far, other parties such as the social democratic SPD and the christian democrats have already given it a high profile this year. She mentioned that the statement made by the CDU chancellor candidate in connection with the floods stating that the natural disasters would not change the party’s climate policy direction had a downright negative impact on the CDU during the elections.

In Germany, there were serious professional debates during the elections about the decommissioning of coal power, the role of nuclear energy, and the deployment of new renewable energy sources, especially that the country’s constitutional court ruled in 2020 that the government’s climate targets were insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

That’s why Winter has set up a conservative sustainability group called the Klima Union to shape the CDU’s green policy. The votes of the christian democrat voters have also shown that people want to vote for conservative parties and take a stand for climate protection at the same time.

The co-founder of the Klima Union said that the advantage of a democracy is that people can discuss in the democratic process what steps they plan to take to achieve climate neutrality and to choose the right leaders alongside their own values ​​in order to achieve climate neutrality.

You can listen to the full discussion under the following link.