Merz on Germany’s Energy Crisis and Russian Gas

The claim that the German energy crisis was caused by a “lack of Russian gas,” as Merz puts it, lands because it contains a hard truth. Russia’s cutoff shattered a supply arrangement Germany had treated as permanent. But stopping there turns a political failure into a weather report. Gas did not simply vanish. Germany built an economy around cheap Russian fuel, delayed alternatives, and left ordinary people exposed when the bill arrived.

That is the real story: dependence was not an accident. It was a choice. And when a government, industry, or corporate board makes energy choices without asking who carries the risk, the answer is always the same. Workers, renters, small businesses, and anyone without the money to absorb a price shock pay first.

The German Energy Crisis and the Loss of Russian Gas

For decades, Russian pipeline gas was central to Germany’s industrial model. It heated homes, powered factories, and helped make energy-intensive manufacturing globally competitive. The arrangement looked efficient on a spreadsheet. It was also strategically reckless.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed energy into a weapon, that vulnerability became impossible to ignore. Supplies fell, prices surged, and Germany rushed to replace pipeline gas with liquefied natural gas, fill storage facilities, and subsidize consumers and companies. The immediate emergency was real. A country that had relied so heavily on one authoritarian supplier had very little room to maneuver.

Merz is right on one narrow point: losing Russian gas was a major trigger for the price shock. Pretending otherwise would be performative denial. Germany’s wholesale gas prices did not spike because citizens used too much electricity or because climate policy appeared out of nowhere. They spiked because a dependency that had been ignored for years broke violently.

But a trigger is not the same as a complete cause. Saying the crisis happened because Russian gas disappeared can quietly excuse the decisions that made its disappearance so devastating. It is like blaming the fire alarm for the fire.

Dependence Was a Political Choice

Germany had warnings. Russia’s use of energy leverage was not invented in 2022. The country had seen supply disputes, geopolitical aggression, and clear evidence that cheap fuel came with political conditions. Yet major leaders and business interests continued to defend deeper dependency, often in the name of stability, competitiveness, and pragmatism.

That language deserves suspicion. “Pragmatism” often means someone else will deal with the consequences later.

The Nord Stream projects became symbols of that gamble. Supporters presented them as commercial infrastructure. Critics saw an expansion of dependence on the Kremlin and a threat to European security. The critics were not being dramatic. They were reading the risk correctly.

Germany also made its energy transition harder through contradictory choices. Its nuclear phaseout was politically popular in some quarters and fiercely contested in others, but the timing became especially controversial once gas supply security collapsed. Closing dispatchable low-carbon generation while trying to cut fossil fuel use created a tighter and more expensive balancing act. That does not mean nuclear power is a magic answer. It means energy policy has trade-offs, and slogans cannot replace capacity planning.

The same applies to renewables. Wind and solar are essential to breaking fossil dependence, cutting emissions, and limiting the power of petro-states. Yet building them fast enough requires grids, storage, permits, skilled labor, local consent, and backup systems for periods when output is low. Germany made significant renewable progress, but it did not build every supporting piece at the speed the moment demanded.

Merz’s Argument Leaves Out the Price of Delay

When Friedrich Merz frames the German energy crisis around the lack of Russian gas, he is also making a political argument about Germany’s current energy direction. The implication is usually that the country has weakened itself by rejecting dependable supply before replacements were fully ready.

There is a case worth debating there. Households and manufacturers need affordable, reliable energy. Climate goals fail politically if leaders treat rising bills as collateral damage. A transition that punishes people while protecting corporate margins will lose public support, and it should.

But Merz’s framing risks romanticizing the old arrangement. Russian gas was never truly cheap if its price included geopolitical exposure, financing an aggressive state, and handing strategic leverage to a supplier willing to use it. The invoice was delayed. It was not absent.

A serious critique must also ask who benefited from the old system. Large industrial consumers gained from low input costs. Governments enjoyed the economic growth those costs supported. Energy traders and infrastructure interests found opportunity. Then the system cracked, and public money was needed to cushion the damage. That is not a free market success story. It is private upside backed by public risk.

Energy Security Is More Than Keeping the Lights On

The loudest energy debates often create a false choice: cheap fossil fuels or expensive climate action. Real energy security is broader than that.

It means diverse supplies instead of dependence on one foreign power. It means efficient homes so families are less hostage to heating costs. It means domestic renewable generation, modern grids, storage, and demand management. It means firm capacity for difficult periods, whether that comes from hydro, nuclear, interconnections, storage, or carefully limited backup generation. The right mix depends on geography, infrastructure, costs, and public consent.

It also means asking who owns the system and who controls the gains. Replacing Russian pipeline gas with imported LNG may reduce one strategic danger, but it does not automatically create energy freedom. It can replace one dependency with another, expose consumers to volatile global markets, and lock in expensive fossil infrastructure for decades.

The answer is not to pretend fossil fuels can disappear overnight. The answer is to stop treating permanent dependence as realism.

What a Harder, Fairer Energy Policy Looks Like

Germany needs an energy policy that can survive a crisis without demanding that ordinary people choose between heating and eating. That starts with speed, but not speed for its own sake. Faster grid connections, renewable deployment, and building retrofits matter because they reduce exposure to fuel prices. Public investment matters because private markets tend to underbuild the infrastructure that pays off over decades.

Affordability needs direct protection too. Broad subsidies can be necessary during an emergency, but they often send the most money to those who consume the most. Better designs protect basic household use, support low-income renters, and require large corporations receiving aid to meet clear conditions on jobs, investment, and transparency.

Industry should not be abandoned. Germany’s manufacturing base supports millions of livelihoods and remains central to Europe’s economy. But public support for energy-intensive industry should buy something back: clean investment, secure employment, local production, and credible plans to reduce fossil reliance. No blank checks. No public rescue for executives while workers are told to tighten their belts.

This is where the argument gets real. A green transition without material fairness becomes easy prey for reactionary politics. A fossil-fuel nostalgia campaign that ignores climate risk and authoritarian leverage is equally dishonest. People deserve better than being forced to pick which form of insecurity they can afford.

The Lesson Behind the Crisis

The German energy crisis caused by the lack of Russian gas was not just a supply story. It was a warning about what happens when leaders call dependence “stability” until the dependency breaks.

Merz can point to the immediate loss of gas, and critics can point to years of bad planning. Both observations can be true. The test is whether Germany learns the deeper lesson: energy is not just a commodity. It is power, security, and survival.

Wear your beliefs proudly, but demand policy that does more than sound tough. The future belongs to countries that refuse to trade public security for short-term convenience.