It’s not easy being Green: Environmental Discourse in Election Campaigns in Germany 2009 and 2013

The Fukushima disaster in 2011 largely impacted public and political discussion on safety of nuclear energy in Europe. The electoral successes of Alliance 90/ the Green party in the German states in the aftermath of the catastrophe showed how important was the nuclear energy issue to the voters. The party had already performed very well in 2009 federal elections and became a strong challenger of mainstream parties. As a result, the governmental coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP had to revoke its recent decision to extend the life of nuclear power plants and to pronounce the nuclear power phase-out. Despite the successes in German states in 2013 Bundestag elections the Green party performed worse than in 2010. In my paper, I focus on the environmental discourse in both campaigns and explore the impact of the 2011 events on the parties’ strategies towards environmental and nuclear energy issues. I argue, that the parties approached these issues on two dimensions of electoral competition: issue dimension and issue framing dimension. First, I expect that as a result of public attention to these issues the issue salience of environmental and nuclear energy issues in party manifestos in 2013 rises. I further assume that trying to win over the Green party voters, other parties adopted ecological framing towards other issues more often than in 2009 elections. I expect that parties from the left, ideologically close to the Green party, are more keen on adopting the frame borrowing strategy than their counterparts. To test my assumptions, I analyse the party manifestos that have been coded according to an extended version of the Policy Frames Codebook (Boydstun and Gross 2014) and Comparative Agendas project issue coding scheme.