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@ErikJonker

Energiewende is just part of the puzzle - look at Merkel’s immigration policy, employment policy, financial discipline, customs policy, Green Deal and other topics used by AfD as their vehicle.

And the execution of policies is the not some kind of minor aspect here - it’s the most important part. Everyone may recognise that things may need change, but how Energiewende was implemented, it made things actually worse not better. I think this was one of the factors that actually pushed many people into climate denialism even if they were initially neutral or supportive. Just remember what people pushing Energiewende were saying in 2010 - there were promises of clean, cheap electricity within a decade (!). Instead you got very expensive electricity made out of coal and gas when renewables don’t work.

As for German car industry or EU industry in general, you can’t really “transform” to compete with cheap imports from China, where industry runs on cheap coal electricity and slave labour. That’s physically impossible.

You either protect your environmentally-friendly industry with customs tariffs, like Switzerland does, or you just openly tell everyone “okay, we’re shutting down industry here and switching to cheap imports because we don’t give a shit about CO2 emitted in China and slave labour”.

But you can’t say “oh we care very much about environment so we shut down our clean industry and import everything from China”, this just doesn’t make sense. That kind of policy is exactly what drives people towards AfD.

@w7voa