Report: German soft power has worked for decades to undermine nuclear energy in France, "to prevent French industry from ... gaining a competitive advantage"

A friend points me to this remarkable article in the French centre-right news magazine L’Express, on Germany’s increasingly unwelcome soft-power efforts to undermine French energy policy:

Their names are Rosa Luxemburg and Heinrich Böll. These German political foundations don’t make the headlines, but they’re deliberately undermining the French nuclear industry according to a recent report by the School of Economic Warfare. Their weapons? Drafting documents according to an anti-nuclear narrative, guiding the elites through training courses … visiting and meeting foreign politicians, forming alliances with specific NGOs and environmentalist parties …

This influence peddling benefits from substantial financial resources. According to the report, the German Bundestag's overall allocation to all political foundations is constantly increasing: from €295 million in 2000, to over €466 million in 2014, and finally €690 million by 2023! For report author Christian Harbulot, the message is clear: Behind all the rhetoric about cooperation between EU member states, Germany is doing everything in its power to prevent French industry from benefiting from cheap energy and thus gaining a competitive advantage.

These comments echo those of former EDF [Électricité de France] head Henri Proglio. “The thirty-year German obsession has been the disintegration of EDF. They've succeeded,” he said last December during a hearing as part of the parliamentary enquiry into French loss of energy independence. In a recent report, L’Express also revealed German efforts across Europe to exclude nuclear power from all mechanisms of financial support. And with foundations like Heinrich Böll, which has offices in Paris, the project of undermining [French nuclear power generation] is also being carried out on French soil ...

You can find an English version of the report by the French School of Economic Warfare here.

Note that German Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck, a member of the anti-nuclear Green Party who is fully mobbed up with major climate NGOs like Agora, spent much of the energy crisis last Fall blaming potential power shortages on nuclear plant maintenance in France.

At least some of the German organisations promoting anti-nuclear ideology in France probably do have devious motives related to undermining French nuclear power generation. The political backlash against the ruinous energy transition, which will only lead to more expensive and more unreliable electricity in Germany, might be mitigated if all of Europe is dragged into more or less the same state of energy insecurity.

The full picture, however, is somewhat more complex and unsettling. In earlier posts, I noted that the vast foreign-funded climate cabal currently steering German energy policy and strangling nuclear power have important connections to American philanthropic organisations. A key figure is the American environmentalist Hal Harvey, whom Zeit has christened “the most powerful Green politician in the world.” Harvey spent years directing funding from the Hewlett Foundation to set up key German climate NGOs that now basically dictate how Germany generates its power. This funding is largely responsible for the careers of leading anti-nuclear politicians like Rainer Baake.

According to a key article in Der Spiegel, Harvey supports German climate policies because he “sees Europe as the key to preparing a climate-neutral future.” Germany, in other words, is an important bridge-head via which this entire ideology enters Europe, and it’s inevitably coloured in turn by the peculiar German phobia of nuclear power – a phobia arising from cultural impressions of the Chernobyl disaster and the peculiar influence of the school curriculum, where students for decades have grown up reading histrionic nuclear disaster fan fiction.