One day after the Twenty-seven Summit closed, Brussels and Berlin announced this Saturday in unison the end of lockdown German to the law that will prohibit from 2035 the new registrations of cars that emit CO2. Something that on Friday neither the chancellor could take for granted Olaf Schölz nor the president of the European Commission (EC), ursula von de leyen. At that time, successive proposals in search of a compromise solution were still circulating between Brussels and Berlin.
The announcement of the unlocking corresponded to the vice president of the EC and in charge of the European Green Pact, the Dutch Frans Timmermannsand the German Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing, responsible for the mess created with the German veto to previously agreed European legislation. “We have agreed with Germany on the future use of synthetic fuels & rdquor ;, said Timmermanns, via twitter. “Vehicles equipped with a combustion engine that use CO2 neutral fuels may continue to be registered after 2035”, confirmed Wissing.
Scholz’s minister had already advanced on Friday that at the The latest offer from the EC had to be ironed out by “some legal problems & rdquor;. Scholz had left the summit a few hours earlier with the same phrase with which he arrived: there were good omens for reaching consensus, he said. In the meantime, a last “legally secure & rdquor; for save synthetic fuels of Wissing, the so-called E-Fuel. A term that just a few weeks ago was unknown to many Germans, until the minister came out in defense of it.
He blocking last minute to a law that was considered resolved was a problem for the relations of the first European power with the majority of its partners and an affront to a historic decision to eliminate combustion engines, had warned the Minister of Economy and Climate Protection, the green Robert Habeck, with the rank of vice-chancellor in the tripartite between Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, environmentalists and liberals.
The “obsession” of the liberal Wissing for defending E-Fuel almost in injury time had pitted not only Germany against Brussels, but also created problems of coexistence in the Scholz coalition. The Green many toads have already had to be swallowed as a result of the energy crisis precipitated by the war in Ukraine – such as the postponement for three and a half months of the nuclear blackoutwhich should have been consummated last December–.
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Wissing has generated a series of internal scuffles and is, for the Green electorate and also the Social Democrats, an exponent of the submission of the Liberal Party (FDP) to the interests of the industry. In this case, he does not even to the powerful automotive sector as a whole. E-Fuel essentially interests one of its manufacturers, the elitist Porsche, which is investing in a plant for the development of so-called synthetic fuels in Chile. For the other big German brands, this alternative played practically no role.
The tensions in Scholz’s coalition were reflected this past week in some statements by Habeck on public television. There he opened up and attributed to “internal leaks & rdquor; information that affects his ministry and that appeared published in the sensationalist newspaper “Bild & rdquor ;, a medium traditionally hostile to the greens. It was almost a declaration of war, for many directed at the liberals. This Sunday a crisis meeting is being held in Berlin at the Chancellery aimed at appeasing tensions. The peace reached in Brussels settles at least one of the internal problems of the tripartite.