Perhaps the biggest winner in Germany’s election: nuclear power

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Germany’s conservatives won the national election on Sunday, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party nearly doubled its share of the vote from the last election to secure a strong second-place finish.

Nuclear energy may be the big winner.

Europe’s largest economy shuttered its last reactors two years ago in what was meant to be an irreversible exit from atomic energy. But surging energy prices and electricity demand are driving calls to revive Germany’s nuclear power industry.

As the victorious Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, wrote in their party manifesto, “We are resolved to stick with the nuclear energy option, counting on research on nuclear energy in its 4th and 5th generation, small modular reactors, and fusion reactors. We are assessing the resumption of operation of the recently-shut-down nuclear power plants.”

The CDU’s leader and Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said last month he regrets withdrawing from nuclear power. “We are examining whether we should build these small modular reactors—perhaps together with France,” Merz told the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

In an interview last week on CNBC, Klaus Wiener, a CDU lawmaker in the Bundestag, called the country’s nuclear phaseout “a huge mistake.”

“They were technically sound, they were doing well, and safe—but the government has, for ideological reasons, decided to shut them down,” he said. “We should have used them longer. That would have made a big difference in energy prices and supply.”

Yet Wiener cautioned that turning the shuttered plants back on was unlikely, echoing statements Germany’s biggest utilities made in recent calls with investors. “Now unfortunately, three years down the road, these nuclear power plants, they can be recovered but that would be very hard,” he said. “It takes three to five years, possibly, and it’ll take a lot of money. If we want to reengage again with nuclear energy, it will not be about this generation of nuclear power plants.”

That the CDU—the party once led by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who oversaw the nuclear exit—is now willing to support atomic energy is a major shift. A poll taken in 2022 found 53 percent of Germans opposed quitting nuclear. By the eve of the final shutdowns the following April, 59 percent said the phaseout was “wrong.”

While it’s likely only a small factor in its sobering rise to power, the AfD—whose ties to neo-Nazis and defenses of the Gestapo proved too radical even for their former political allies in France (though not for Elon Musk or Vice President JD Vance) has long been the lone party representing that majority view. Founded two years after the Fukushima disaster, the AfD previously stood as the only party to oppose the phaseout pushed by everyone from the center-right, which initiated the shut-downs, to the center-left and Greens—under whose leadership the last plants closed.

Now the AfD is pushing to completely reverse the closures and undo policies that support renewables such as wind and solar power. (Nuclear is not renewable, because the uranium fuel is spent in the power-generation process.)

“What our government is doing…they’re destroying—they’re blowing them up—our nuclear plants,” Beatrix von Storch, an AfD member of the Bundestag, said in an interview on Deutsche Welle last month. “We can see our energy is no longer stable. It’s far too expensive.”

Merz has ruled out any coalition government with the AfD. Last month, however, the German parliament narrowly approved a nonbinding resolution Merz put forward to call to turn away more migrants, thanks to support from AfD lawmakers.

The big question now is whether Merz will lower his “firewall” against working with the AfD to bring back nuclear power.