Once again, Alexander Dobrindt, once hapless transport minister and currently leader of the CSU deputies in the German Bundestag, found the most catchy vocabulary. He spoke of the "green clan structures" that prevailed in Robert Habeck's Ministry of Economic Affairs. It's as if the head of the department and his staff were soon planning a jewel robbery in former electoral vaults.

Ralph Bollmann

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of economics and "money & more" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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Now Habeck's influential state secretary Patrick Graichen has to vacate his post. Since he realized quite late that he would have been better off not participating in the election of a long-time friend and best man to the head of a supreme federal authority, something that has long been known is suddenly up for debate again in Germany.

It's about the relationship between politics, expertise and climate activism, about the struggle between think tanks and lobbyists, about the relationship of the Greens to organizations and associations with which they have at least a long common history: Is the world of climate politicians and climate experts really that small, some are now wondering that everyone here is connected to everyone else?

Separate march through the institutions

The matter can hardly be understood without going back to the common history of eco-activists and the Green Party, to the beginnings of the German environmental movement, to its partly separate march through the institutions and to the failures of other actors. The history of the Oeko-Institut, the institution where State Secretary Graichen's siblings work and whose 200 or so permanent employees today live from contracts from a wide variety of public bodies as well as from companies, goes back the furthest.

The affair began on November 5, 1977 at Wiedenfelsen, in a hotel on the Schwarzwald-Hochstraße, which today serves as an event location. 27 eco-activists signed the declaration on the establishment of an Oeko-Institut. At the time, South Baden was in turmoil because the Stuttgart state government led by Christian Democrat Prime Minister Hans Filbinger wanted to build the Wyhl nuclear power plant directly on the Kaiserstuhl.

It was the beginning of the West German anti-nuclear movement. In court cases and hearings, opponents of power plants encountered a "phalanx of experts who advise administration and industry," as the founding call put it. "In the long term, however, citizens' initiatives will only succeed in enforcing their demands in planning and in courts if they themselves provide the necessary scientific justification." The institute, which was to be founded in Freiburg, was to "provide expert opinions and provide experts," it said. "We can no longer leave this research to the state and industry alone."

The state was an adversary, not a client

In the beginning, the public sector was the opponent, not the client. That changed in 1985 when the first Green minister in a federal state, Joschka Fischer in Hesse, took office. This was "the beginning of a productive collaboration between his Ministry of the Environment and the Oeko-Institut", which now had a branch in Darmstadt, as the scientists proudly write in their self-presentation. "In 1986, almost all projects in the Oeko-Institut's energy sector were commissioned and financed by the Greens – half of the orders came from the new Hessian Ministry of the Environment under Joschka Fischer."