A furore over an eco-tax on petrol reveals much about Germany's ambivalent attitude to the environmental cause, writes John Hooper
Wednesday April 25, 2001
It began with a headline that defied you not to read on. "Holidays only for the rich", screamed the tabloid Bild Zeitung. The point of the story underneath was a little more prosaic: the authorities on Mallorca were planning a new levy on visitors to help the island recover from some of the environmental damage wrought by tourism. The proposed tax would add about £35 to the average holiday for a family of four. That would scarcely put Mallorca into the Mustique class. But it has not stopped Bild from whipping up a campaign against the tax. Last week, the paper published a letter to King Juan Carlos of Spain, which it urged its readers to cut out and send off to the palace in Madrid. The letter protested that Germans had done their best to keep the island tidy and insisted that they had a right to take part in the debate on Mallorca's "eco-tax". "Paella and Ballerman [a bar on the island which is popular with Germans] are almost as German as sauerbraten [marinaded beef] and Cologne Cathedral", declared the paper.
In fact, Mallorca's eco-tax is unlikely ever to come into effect. The whole affair has far more to do with Germany's politics than Spain's. Bild and the Christian Democrat movement which it broadly supports have for months now been railing against a different and altogether more onerous eco-tax: an additional, progressively increasing, levy on petrol which the Greens insisted on as a condition of joining Gerhard Schröder's coalition government.
Now, rising crude oil prices have combined with the eco-tax to push the cost of an average tank full of petrol to around DM100 [£32]. The result is a round of finger-pointing which said a lot, both about the present government and the voters who will choose next year whether to re-elect it. The immediate, if paradoxical, effect of the latest rise in pump prices has been to ease the pressure on the Greens. Mr Schröder's reaction was subtly to lay the responsibility at the door of the oil companies.
Last weekend, he voiced the fear that the increase could damage the economy and the hope that it would soon be reversed. But his central message was that there was nothing he could do about it. "If I could, I would", he said, implicitly signalling that the eco-tax was sacrosanct. As often happens with the Schröder administration, however, there was a member of the cabinet who had either not been told what the policy was - or had decided to ignore it.
Werner Müller, Mr Schröder's non-party economics minister, gave two interviews over the weekend which succeeded in upsetting both the motoring lobby and the Greens. He told hard-pressed car drivers that they did not have to fill up when prices were high, but also argued that the eco-tax should not continue to rise after 2003.
The oil companies have since brought the row full circle by reminding Mr Schröder that there is indeed something he can do - bring down taxes on petrol which, they said, were the highest in Europe. The affair has served as a warning to the chancellor of the downside attached to an alliance with the Greens, and to the Greens of the downside of being in government at all.
Germans give an impression to the rest of the world that they are keen environmentalists. And the appearance is not entirely deceptive. They will cheerfully submit to the chore of sorting their rubbish so that it can be recycled. They anguish over acid rain and climate change.
Yet, as a recent "mini-census" by the federal statistics office showed, large numbers of them baulk at anything that will interfere with their use of a private car. It showed that, the Green's eco-tax notwithstanding, the proportion of commuters going to work by car was still rising. It had jumped from 60 to 64% in the past five years alone. "Even for brief, inner-city trips of less than 10 kilometres [six miles], 45% of commuters opted for their car", the study found.
Email john.hooper @guardian.co.uk