Walpurgis Night of Madness: Germany in the Grip of Climate Socialism

With the scarecrow of an ‘industrial power price’ and a staged debate about ‘technology neutrality’ in climate policy, the German government is engaging in media camouflage. In reality, the course of climate socialism continues unabated. Faced with dramatic deindustrialization, even state institutions such as the Federal Audit Office are now getting cold feet.

Germany is entering the eighth year of industrial contraction. Nearly a decade of declining value creation, falling productivity, and rising unemployment—thinly masked by public employment schemes and an avalanche of government credit—document a collapse without precedent in postwar history.

Climate socialism has failed

The grand project of erecting a climate socialist regime is shattering against the limits of economic reality. Amid a rolling wave of insolvencies, this drama can no longer be concealed, not even by compliant media.

By the end of 2025, more than 24,000 companies will have exited the market. Hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs have been destroyed. Firms such as Meyer Burger, toolmaker Leichingen, auto supplier Meteor in Lower Saxony, and machine builder Afermann in Osnabrück rank among the latest victims of an ideological crusade against Germany’s productive core.

Submission to Brussels’ climate diktat was the original sin—marking the abandonment of market principles and initiating a deep incursion of the state into the private sector.

Energy policy was identified as a lever of power. The nuclear exit, the abandonment of cheap Russian gas, and decades of subsidizing inefficient renewables warped the energy system into a structure that can survive only through permanent subsidies.

Hydrogen and the Federal Audit Office

The theory of intervention spirals is now playing out almost textbook-perfectly: one intervention begets another. Growing subsidy dependence has produced grotesque offshoots such as the government’s so-called hydrogen strategy.

Green hydrogen is produced via electrolysis using renewable electricity. It is meant to replace coal, gas, and oil in steel and chemicals, serve as synthetic fuel, and store surplus wind and solar power.

What has emerged is a political monster—a multibillion-euro sinkhole added to the trillion-euro subsidy graveyard of the green transformation. Seven billion euros have already been poured into this pit, capital withdrawn from the market and booked to taxpayers via public debt.

This ‘market’ is nothing but a fantasy of green central planners. Even the Federal Audit Office concluded in October that Germany is further than ever from achieving its hydrogen targets.

Hydrogen is expensive, unused, and lacks a real market—an unusually blunt verdict from one of the first state institutions to break the silence.

Bought silence, celebrated madness

The economy remains mute. Small firms are unheard; large corporations have merged with the subsidy regime. Bought silence—the silence of the lambs before the slaughter. No one dares admit publicly that political primacy has stripped them of real influence.

The most disturbing symbol of ideological delirium was the spectacle of cheering activists dancing before the crumbling cooling towers of deliberately shut-down nuclear plants. This had nothing to do with environmentalism. It was pure resentment toward bourgeois society, revealed in crystalline form.

A Walpurgis Night of madness—celebrated by people cocooned in taxpayer-funded NGOs or state employment, detached from real life and from the performance-based society whose core is the free market.

Germany’s ideological blockade may be unique. Historians will struggle to find another nation so thoroughly deceived by a small clique of climate socialists. Beneath the North Sea lie some 32 billion cubic meters of recoverable natural gas—yet only around four billion are extracted annually. NGOs have captured policy, blocking production at all costs.

Germany also sits atop roughly 2.3 trillion cubic meters of shale gas and another 450 billion in coal seam gas. Given the country’s dire energy situation, exploiting these reserves should be imperative.

Yet aside from the AfD, no political force is willing to confront climate-socialist dogma or even reopen the debate.

Industry on the brink—no Plan B

The collapse of German industry triggers cascading downstream effects across the economy. Prosperity rises and falls with industrial output—there is no dispute. A return to Russian gas should therefore be a top priority; cooperation with Gazprom and Rosneft once ensured global competitiveness.

Germany’s entanglement in the Ukraine conflict and the push to expropriate Russian assets at Euroclear revealed how far rational policymaking has already been abandoned.

The same applies to nuclear power. The world has moved on. Small modular reactors promise shorter construction times, lower capital costs, and no meltdown risk. A nuclear comeback would restore Germany’s strategic footing—but only if started now.

Shedding ideology

Costly follies such as the stalled hydrogen rollout must be consigned to the archives of failed experiments—a warning to future generations that infantile, ideologically driven politics always ends in catastrophe.

The apocalyptic CO2 narrative must be discarded once and for all. Since Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to weaponize CO2 for climate policy, independent science has failed to dismantle this moralistic storyline endlessly amplified by state-aligned media.

Germany should follow the American example and exit the Paris Climate Agreement to rein in Brussels’ power machine. That is impossible with the current political class—Berlin’s praetorian guard of this supranational project—whose goal is now unmistakable: the dismantling of German industry in favor of a green artificial economy.

Ideology has a price. Germans have long been living on credit—at the expense of the future. That system is now collapsing. And with it, public willingness to swallow apocalyptic madness served up by politics and media.