When the German government presents its update of the National Hydrogen Strategy today, there will also be a lot of talk about Europe. The declarations of intent range from a continental hydrogen backbone to coordination of imports. But as far as European coordination is concerned, this and future federal governments are to be wished sufficient perseverance, especially in the case of hydrogen.
“In order to procure the required quantities and reduce costs in the face of global competition, cooperation between European member states is being sought“, the paper says, for example. But it will be years before joint purchasing via a European hydrogen bank works, one EU diplomat estimates. At the same time, industry and the energy sector urgently need sufficient quantities to manage the transformation.
Berlin is still missing one or two specifications from the Commission – such as criteria for dealing with CO2 captured from natural gas during the production of blue hydrogen. In the case of bilateral agreements with storage countries, there are sometimes thorny issues to be clarified: What if the government should change in Norway and a new one demands guarantees from Germany for unforeseen damage that may not occur for decades? This is one of the concerns of the German industry.
The hydrogen strategy is therefore only an intermediate step in years of political work – and further reports from Europe.Table.
Who is competing again? Who is quitting? Will male deputies have to make room for women? The lists of the German parties for the 2024 European elections must be drawn up by February at the latest. 96 seats are up for grabs in Germany. Since there will be no blocking clause in the 2024 election either, the rule of thumb roughly applies: For one percent of the votes cast, there is one mandate. We give an overview of what is on the lists of the pro-European parties in Germany.
The CDU and CSU currently have 29 members in the Strasbourg Parliament. In the polls for the German elections, the CDU and CSU currently have 28 percent. If Germans were to vote accordingly in the European elections on June 9, the CDU and CSU would have no prospect of additional seats in the next European Parliament.
The anxiety in North Rhine-Westphalia is great, because state leader Hendrik Wüst has announced to place fifty percent women and fifty percent men on the list, according to the zipper procedure. In the European Parliament from NRW is so far only one woman, Sabine Verheyen, and five men: Stefan Berger, Peter Liese, Markus Pieper, Dennis Radtke and Axel Voss.
All six MEPs would like to continue. Verheyen and Radtke are considered to be set. Berger, Liese, Pieper and Voss, on the other hand, are in doubt about a promising place on the state list. It is not yet foreseeable which women could run for office. Should a Member of Parliament from North Rhine-Westphalia withdraw before the election date, Birgit Ernst from East Westphalia would be a successor.
Of the German CDU/CSU Members of Parliament, Peter Jahr has announced that he will not be running again. Among the candidates who want to succeed him, Thomas Schmidt, Minister for Regional Development in Saxony, is considered to have a good chance. Karolin Braunsberger-Reinhold, against whom allegations of sexual harassment became known in the spring, was not nominated again by her state association. Alexandra Mehnert now takes first place in Saxony-Anhalt.
In Baden-Württemberg, EP Vice-President Rainer Wieland could miss out on entry. He had occupied first place on the state list in 2019, but is now only fifth. Andrea Wechsler has moved up to the top position in the southwest this time. Daniel Caspary, Andreas Schwab and Norbert Lins occupy the other promising places.
The CSU draws up the European list after the state elections on Oct. 8. There is gender parity in the Bavarian regional group. All six members want to run again. It is unclear whether Marlene Mortler will again have the support of party leader Markus Söder.
The German SPD group consists of 16 deputies. The party is currently polling at 18 percent. So there could soon be one or two more Social Democratic deputies in Strasbourg. Joachim Schuster and Dietmar Köster do not want to run again. The party wants to present a gender-parity list headed by Katarina Barley. Thomas Rudner, successor to Ismael Ertug, who recently left the party, is still considering whether to run. Of 16 MEPs, eight of the male MEPs are certainly aiming to run.
Scuffles are expected over the four promising seats on the NRW SPD list. Jens Geier, the head of the German group, wants to run for first place on the state list. Birgit Sippel has a strong house power and is considered to be seeded for second place.
Michelle Müntefering, a member of the Bundestag who is aiming for Brussels and comes from the same district, is therefore given little chance of ousting Sippel. Cologne-based Hanna Fritz and Arno Gildemeister claim one of the next seats. MEP Petra Kammerevert wants to run again and claims fourth place on the state list.
Manuela Schwesig, who is influential within the party, wants to ensure that Sabrina Repp from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania gets a promising place on the list. Repp is deputy leader of the Jusos (Young Socialists in the SPD) in the state. It is expected that the party executive committee will put at least one eastern German candidate among the first ten places. The Saxon MEP Matthias Ecke is given chances for a promising place on the list.
Ronja Endres, the leader of the Bavarian SPD, is likely to enter the European Parliament. She claims first place on the state list. Maria Noichl, a member of parliament, wants to run for second place. In return, the Lower Saxony SPD wants to run with two men in the first two places on the list: Bernd Lange and Tiemo Wölken. Men and women usually alternate on the lists. It could be that the party executive committee will help a female candidate from Lower Saxony to a promising place on the list.
The Greens are represented in the European Parliament by 21 members from Germany. In the national polls, the party has 13 percent. So it could be that there will be fewer Greens from Germany in the next EP.
The prominent MEPs Reinhard Bütikofer and Ska Keller will not run again. MEPs Romeo Franz and Pierette Herzberger-Fofana have little chance of a promising place on the European list, which will be voted on at the party conference in Karlsruhe in November. Their state associations in Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria have not given the two MEPs the vote to run for office.
In addition to the Members of Parliament with such a vote, the scientist Janka Oertel also has a chance of securing a promising place on the list. Oertel is an Asia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Her candidacy is supported by the Realos.
The FDP has five members in Strasbourg. The polls put it at seven percent. It can therefore expect to have at least as many seats as before. Nicola Beer will not run again because she is going to the European Investment Bank (EIB). Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann is to be the top candidate in her place. Andreas Glück, Svenja Hahn, Moritz Körner and Jan-Christoph Oetjen want to run again.
The Left party has five members in Strasbourg. In the polls, it has four percent of the vote. If it does not split before the election, it could hope to win four seats. The deputies Cornelia Ernst, Martina Michels and Hartmut Scholz are no longer running. Party leader Martin Schirdewan is aiming for the European Parliament again and claims first place on the list. He has proposed that activist Carola Rackete run for second place, MEP Özlem Demirel for third and social physician Gerhard Trabert for fourth. The European list will be drawn up in September.
New York City is breathtaking and embodies the progress, the possibilities of our time. But there, at the headquarters of the United Nations, the challenges we face as a global community also become clear, as if under a magnifying glass: While on one street billion-dollar banks are crowded together, a few blocks away poverty is sky-scraping. We see this huge gap between rich and poor in many places around the world. In the Global South, thousands of children die every day as a result of hunger and malnutrition. Entire countries are threatened with drowning in debt – while billionaires make new record profits and the machinery of consumption keeps turning in the Global North. The goal of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to change this, towards greater justice.
To bring this agenda to life and achieve it by 2030 despite the major cuts of war and pandemic, members of governments, NGOs and experts from around the world met at the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York City from July 10 to 19. As the European Union, we presented our own progress report there and specified our ideas for the further development of the reform agenda. With Commissioners Urpilainen (International Partnerships) and Gentiloni (Economy), the Presidents of the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, as well as the two rapporteurs of the EU Parliament, the EU presented itself as a team of different stakeholders in the style of modern governance.
The tenor of the meetings in New York was clear: UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor for Africa, Cristina Duarte, and all of our interlocutors made it clear time and again that tackling inequalities must be at the heart of our joint work. Societies divided by insurmountable social and economic disparities lack the power to make the critical transformations that would enable all people to live well.
But that costs money. Money that the richer Global North has to free up, but also money that is often lacking in the Global South – because its own resources are not sufficiently developed or the proceeds of the work done are taken away from the people through tax evasion and corruption.
The high-level meeting in New York must therefore be just a start. At the UN SDG Summit in September, at the G20 meeting in New Delhi, and at the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in October of this year, the momentum of the critical SDG mid-term review must be harnessed.
When the number of countries spending more on external debt servicing than on education and health is steadily increasing, it is absolutely essential to introduce a fair and sustainable debt burden regime for the most indebted nations. Countries that introduce free school meals and promote sustainable value addition should be supported in doing so, not prevented from making the necessary investments. There is an urgent need for comprehensive and rapid reform of international financial institutions. The IMF, the World Bank, and European and national development banks must refocus their priorities on social cohesion and the fight against climate change.
A consistent effort to combat tax havens alone can help many countries become stronger and more independent. We should drive forward the digitization of tax and customs administrations with joint pilot projects to ensure that the economic returns generated are also available to the respective countries.
A new concept that attracted a lot of interest in New York is the so-called Inequality Marker, introduced by the EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, on the initiative of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. This marker will serve to target programs and measures in the field of European development cooperation where they are most urgently needed in a verifiable manner, because our work for the weakest 40 percent of societies will become objectively measurable.
The radiance of New York, the passion with which work was done at the HLPF, and the determination with which many of our partners act must be harnessed for the follow-up meetings coming up this year. Global poly-crises and the geopolitical situation in a newly polarizing world leave us no time. For the EU, concrete progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is part of our political mandate and at the same time a condition of our own survival.
Udo Bullmann is an SPD MEP and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights as well as coordinator of the Socialist Group in the Committee on Development.
When the German government presents its update of the National Hydrogen Strategy today, there will also be a lot of talk about Europe. The declarations of intent range from a continental hydrogen backbone to coordination of imports. But as far as European coordination is concerned, this and future federal governments are to be wished sufficient perseverance, especially in the case of hydrogen.
“In order to procure the required quantities and reduce costs in the face of global competition, cooperation between European member states is being sought“, the paper says, for example. But it will be years before joint purchasing via a European hydrogen bank works, one EU diplomat estimates. At the same time, industry and the energy sector urgently need sufficient quantities to manage the transformation.
Berlin is still missing one or two specifications from the Commission – such as criteria for dealing with CO2 captured from natural gas during the production of blue hydrogen. In the case of bilateral agreements with storage countries, there are sometimes thorny issues to be clarified: What if the government should change in Norway and a new one demands guarantees from Germany for unforeseen damage that may not occur for decades? This is one of the concerns of the German industry.
The hydrogen strategy is therefore only an intermediate step in years of political work – and further reports from Europe.Table.
Who is competing again? Who is quitting? Will male deputies have to make room for women? The lists of the German parties for the 2024 European elections must be drawn up by February at the latest. 96 seats are up for grabs in Germany. Since there will be no blocking clause in the 2024 election either, the rule of thumb roughly applies: For one percent of the votes cast, there is one mandate. We give an overview of what is on the lists of the pro-European parties in Germany.
The CDU and CSU currently have 29 members in the Strasbourg Parliament. In the polls for the German elections, the CDU and CSU currently have 28 percent. If Germans were to vote accordingly in the European elections on June 9, the CDU and CSU would have no prospect of additional seats in the next European Parliament.
The anxiety in North Rhine-Westphalia is great, because state leader Hendrik Wüst has announced to place fifty percent women and fifty percent men on the list, according to the zipper procedure. In the European Parliament from NRW is so far only one woman, Sabine Verheyen, and five men: Stefan Berger, Peter Liese, Markus Pieper, Dennis Radtke and Axel Voss.
All six MEPs would like to continue. Verheyen and Radtke are considered to be set. Berger, Liese, Pieper and Voss, on the other hand, are in doubt about a promising place on the state list. It is not yet foreseeable which women could run for office. Should a Member of Parliament from North Rhine-Westphalia withdraw before the election date, Birgit Ernst from East Westphalia would be a successor.
Of the German CDU/CSU Members of Parliament, Peter Jahr has announced that he will not be running again. Among the candidates who want to succeed him, Thomas Schmidt, Minister for Regional Development in Saxony, is considered to have a good chance. Karolin Braunsberger-Reinhold, against whom allegations of sexual harassment became known in the spring, was not nominated again by her state association. Alexandra Mehnert now takes first place in Saxony-Anhalt.
In Baden-Württemberg, EP Vice-President Rainer Wieland could miss out on entry. He had occupied first place on the state list in 2019, but is now only fifth. Andrea Wechsler has moved up to the top position in the southwest this time. Daniel Caspary, Andreas Schwab and Norbert Lins occupy the other promising places.
The CSU draws up the European list after the state elections on Oct. 8. There is gender parity in the Bavarian regional group. All six members want to run again. It is unclear whether Marlene Mortler will again have the support of party leader Markus Söder.
The German SPD group consists of 16 deputies. The party is currently polling at 18 percent. So there could soon be one or two more Social Democratic deputies in Strasbourg. Joachim Schuster and Dietmar Köster do not want to run again. The party wants to present a gender-parity list headed by Katarina Barley. Thomas Rudner, successor to Ismael Ertug, who recently left the party, is still considering whether to run. Of 16 MEPs, eight of the male MEPs are certainly aiming to run.
Scuffles are expected over the four promising seats on the NRW SPD list. Jens Geier, the head of the German group, wants to run for first place on the state list. Birgit Sippel has a strong house power and is considered to be seeded for second place.
Michelle Müntefering, a member of the Bundestag who is aiming for Brussels and comes from the same district, is therefore given little chance of ousting Sippel. Cologne-based Hanna Fritz and Arno Gildemeister claim one of the next seats. MEP Petra Kammerevert wants to run again and claims fourth place on the state list.
Manuela Schwesig, who is influential within the party, wants to ensure that Sabrina Repp from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania gets a promising place on the list. Repp is deputy leader of the Jusos (Young Socialists in the SPD) in the state. It is expected that the party executive committee will put at least one eastern German candidate among the first ten places. The Saxon MEP Matthias Ecke is given chances for a promising place on the list.
Ronja Endres, the leader of the Bavarian SPD, is likely to enter the European Parliament. She claims first place on the state list. Maria Noichl, a member of parliament, wants to run for second place. In return, the Lower Saxony SPD wants to run with two men in the first two places on the list: Bernd Lange and Tiemo Wölken. Men and women usually alternate on the lists. It could be that the party executive committee will help a female candidate from Lower Saxony to a promising place on the list.
The Greens are represented in the European Parliament by 21 members from Germany. In the national polls, the party has 13 percent. So it could be that there will be fewer Greens from Germany in the next EP.
The prominent MEPs Reinhard Bütikofer and Ska Keller will not run again. MEPs Romeo Franz and Pierette Herzberger-Fofana have little chance of a promising place on the European list, which will be voted on at the party conference in Karlsruhe in November. Their state associations in Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria have not given the two MEPs the vote to run for office.
In addition to the Members of Parliament with such a vote, the scientist Janka Oertel also has a chance of securing a promising place on the list. Oertel is an Asia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Her candidacy is supported by the Realos.
The FDP has five members in Strasbourg. The polls put it at seven percent. It can therefore expect to have at least as many seats as before. Nicola Beer will not run again because she is going to the European Investment Bank (EIB). Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann is to be the top candidate in her place. Andreas Glück, Svenja Hahn, Moritz Körner and Jan-Christoph Oetjen want to run again.
The Left party has five members in Strasbourg. In the polls, it has four percent of the vote. If it does not split before the election, it could hope to win four seats. The deputies Cornelia Ernst, Martina Michels and Hartmut Scholz are no longer running. Party leader Martin Schirdewan is aiming for the European Parliament again and claims first place on the list. He has proposed that activist Carola Rackete run for second place, MEP Özlem Demirel for third and social physician Gerhard Trabert for fourth. The European list will be drawn up in September.
New York City is breathtaking and embodies the progress, the possibilities of our time. But there, at the headquarters of the United Nations, the challenges we face as a global community also become clear, as if under a magnifying glass: While on one street billion-dollar banks are crowded together, a few blocks away poverty is sky-scraping. We see this huge gap between rich and poor in many places around the world. In the Global South, thousands of children die every day as a result of hunger and malnutrition. Entire countries are threatened with drowning in debt – while billionaires make new record profits and the machinery of consumption keeps turning in the Global North. The goal of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to change this, towards greater justice.
To bring this agenda to life and achieve it by 2030 despite the major cuts of war and pandemic, members of governments, NGOs and experts from around the world met at the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York City from July 10 to 19. As the European Union, we presented our own progress report there and specified our ideas for the further development of the reform agenda. With Commissioners Urpilainen (International Partnerships) and Gentiloni (Economy), the Presidents of the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, as well as the two rapporteurs of the EU Parliament, the EU presented itself as a team of different stakeholders in the style of modern governance.
The tenor of the meetings in New York was clear: UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor for Africa, Cristina Duarte, and all of our interlocutors made it clear time and again that tackling inequalities must be at the heart of our joint work. Societies divided by insurmountable social and economic disparities lack the power to make the critical transformations that would enable all people to live well.
But that costs money. Money that the richer Global North has to free up, but also money that is often lacking in the Global South – because its own resources are not sufficiently developed or the proceeds of the work done are taken away from the people through tax evasion and corruption.
The high-level meeting in New York must therefore be just a start. At the UN SDG Summit in September, at the G20 meeting in New Delhi, and at the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in October of this year, the momentum of the critical SDG mid-term review must be harnessed.
When the number of countries spending more on external debt servicing than on education and health is steadily increasing, it is absolutely essential to introduce a fair and sustainable debt burden regime for the most indebted nations. Countries that introduce free school meals and promote sustainable value addition should be supported in doing so, not prevented from making the necessary investments. There is an urgent need for comprehensive and rapid reform of international financial institutions. The IMF, the World Bank, and European and national development banks must refocus their priorities on social cohesion and the fight against climate change.
A consistent effort to combat tax havens alone can help many countries become stronger and more independent. We should drive forward the digitization of tax and customs administrations with joint pilot projects to ensure that the economic returns generated are also available to the respective countries.
A new concept that attracted a lot of interest in New York is the so-called Inequality Marker, introduced by the EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, on the initiative of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. This marker will serve to target programs and measures in the field of European development cooperation where they are most urgently needed in a verifiable manner, because our work for the weakest 40 percent of societies will become objectively measurable.
The radiance of New York, the passion with which work was done at the HLPF, and the determination with which many of our partners act must be harnessed for the follow-up meetings coming up this year. Global poly-crises and the geopolitical situation in a newly polarizing world leave us no time. For the EU, concrete progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is part of our political mandate and at the same time a condition of our own survival.
Udo Bullmann is an SPD MEP and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights as well as coordinator of the Socialist Group in the Committee on Development.
