Crises Reshaped Germany’s Energy Transition Debate, Bundestag Analysis Shows

A detailed analysis of nearly five years of German parliamentary debates has found that the country’s energy transition, the Energiewende, remained anchored in its three traditional policy targets even as crises repeatedly reordered their relative importance. Their qualitative, semi-quantitative discourse analysis, published in the journal Energy, Sustainability and Society, tracked how four major systemic events—the Fridays for Future demonstrations, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 change of government, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—reshaped political attention to energy policy.

The study focused on the so-called energy triangle, the long-standing German framework of security of supply, affordability and competitiveness, and environmental sustainability. These qualitative targets, rooted in the Energy Industry Act and repeated in the federal government’s annual monitoring reports, dominated the discourse throughout the period. Yet the researchers found that the ordering of the three targets shifted markedly over time, and that these shifts temporally coincided with major systemic developments. Security of supply, in particular, assumed a distinctive role as the period progressed, ultimately holding the highest share of any target across the entire analysis.

The method rested on transcripts of plenary sittings downloaded from the Bundestag’s website. The team scanned agendas for motions related to energy, energy-related laws, and climate-relevant topics, then ran keyword searches covering terms such as energy, renewables, coal, gas, hydrogen, nuclear, CO2 price, and security of supply. The selected documents were imported into the qualitative analysis software MAXQDA, where a mixed deductive-inductive coding scheme was applied. Coding was performed by one co-author and validated by a second, with intercoder reliability checked by having three co-authors independently code a randomly selected test set. The researchers caution that their analysis captures parliamentary discourse rather than direct policy outcomes, and that it excludes informal negotiations and influences outside parliament.

The Fridays for Future movement, which spread to Germany at the end of 2018 after Greta Thunberg’s August 2018 demonstration in Stockholm, coincided with a clear rise in climate-related motions. In 2018 and 2019, climate protection clearly dominated motions, with more than a third referring to it. The Greens, an opposition party that typically initiates the most motions, brought forward 38.5 percent of climate protection motions in those two years. The authors interpret this as evidence that the demonstrations framed the discourse, though they note the timing suggests contribution rather than proof of causation. The prominence of climate protection subsequently declined somewhat with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.

The pandemic marked a turning point in thematic priorities. From 2020 onward, affordability and competitiveness became the most frequently mentioned topics in motions, a shift the authors link to the economic crisis triggered by lockdowns. The share of motions on this topic rose from 11 percent in 2018 to 27 percent in 2020 and 50 percent in 2022. In 2022, the target accounted for over half of all energy transition-related motion topics. The researchers also observed that in 2021, affordability and security of supply together accounted for their lowest combined share across the years, reflecting greater topical diversity that year, partly because fewer documents existed due to an extended summer break and the federal election.

The war in Ukraine produced the most dramatic discursive shift. After the Russian invasion in February 2022, security of supply surged, reaching a share of 36.36 percent in 2022 and becoming the second most tabled motion topic at about 18 percent. The sub-topic of energy dependence, which had progressed consistently before 2022, increased sharply that year, and energy independence emerged as an explicit new target with the fourth-highest share. The context was stark: in 2020, natural gas covered 26 percent of Germany’s primary energy consumption, with 56 percent of gas imports coming from Russia, and 35 percent of oil consumption was supplied by Russian imports. Speeches in the twentieth legislative period described reducing dependence as a central target and urgent task of the new coalition.

The crisis also diversified the energy resources under discussion. Natural gas peaked at a 12.79 percent share of the debate in 2022, and liquefied natural gas, which had made up no more than about 1 percent in other years, jumped to a share of 18.5 percent. Discussions of potential bridging technologies, long centered almost exclusively on gas, expanded to include LNG, nuclear energy, and hydrogen. The authors note that nuclear energy, whose phase-out had been decided before that of coal, re-entered the debate in 2021 and 2022 as gas and oil prices rose, with policymakers beginning to doubt the exit by the end of 2022. Coal, by contrast, fell to a 5.94 percent share in 2022 after the government’s 2020 decision to phase out coal power by 2038, the date recommended by the Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment.

The analysis also supports the theoretical notion that crises act as windows of opportunity that accelerate political decision-making, drawing on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework. Two legislative examples stand out. The Law to Accelerate the Use of Liquefied Natural Gas, published in May 2022, two months after the invasion, was described by an FDP politician as the fastest bill to pass the house in that legislative period. The abolition of the renewables levy under the Renewable Energy Sources Act was likewise brought forward at short notice, although the authors emphasize that this decision was part of a previously established policy trajectory rather than a direct response to the war. They caution that some policy changes that appear to be crisis reactions may already have been in motion.

Complementary analysis of electoral programs and coalition agreements reinforced the picture. Coded energy-transition passages rose from 3.8 percent of the 2018 coalition agreement to 5.1 percent of the 2021 agreement, suggesting the Energiewende occupied a more central role in coalition-building by 2021. The traditional triangle was explicitly mentioned in the 2017 FDP and SPD programs and the 2018 coalition agreement, but not in the 2021 agreement, and 84.6 percent of the energy triangle code in plenary discussions occurred during the nineteenth legislative period. In the 2021 agreement, security of supply accounted for 75 percent of explicitly mentioned triangle targets, and dependence was absent from the 2018 agreement entirely, appearing only in a subclause in 2021.

The authors conclude that the energy triangle proved resilient, its three targets persisting through protest, pandemic, and war, even as the explicit concept lost prominence in debates and publications over time. They argue that crisis-driven shifts in discourse open windows of opportunity that are often not ideally used to achieve stable long-term targets, and they warn that crisis responses such as LNG expansion, while addressing immediate shortages, risk reinforcing fossil fuel dependencies and slowing the transition. LNG infrastructure, they note, carries a negative climate impact and lower energy efficiency compared to pipeline gas. The study’s scope is limited to the first five months of 2022 and to parliamentary discourse, and the authors recommend future research comparing Bundestag debates with social media discourse and other national contexts to determine whether these short-term discursive shifts translate into long-term policy implementation.

Subject of Research: How systemic events such as the Fridays for Future protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 government change, and the war in Ukraine reshaped political discourse on Germany's Energiewende in Bundestag debates from 2017 to 2022.

Article Title: Protest, pandemic, and war: the political discourse reshaping Germany’s Energiewende

Article References: Venghaus, S., Torkayesh, A., Böhm, K., Arning, K., & Wood, C. (2026). Protest, pandemic, and war: the political discourse reshaping Germany’s Energiewende. Energy, Sustainability and Society, 16(1), Article 44. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-026-00600-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13705-026-00600-z

Keywords: Energiewende, energy transition, Germany, Bundestag, discourse analysis, security of supply, energy triangle, COVID-19, Ukraine war, Fridays for Future, LNG, energy policy