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Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream in Lubmin (archive image)
Photo: Stefan Sauer / dpa
Oil and gas supplies from Russia have come under criticism given the country's war of aggression against Ukraine.
During the general debate in the Bundestag on Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) felt compelled to once again defend the purchase of energy sources.
Scholz said that stopping Russian oil imports could not be implemented overnight.
If you take hasty steps, Germany could face a recession.
The sanctions should not hit the EU harder than the Russian leadership.
Nevertheless, the federal government is working on no longer being dependent on Russian oil and gas in the future.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) flew to Qatar for this purpose.
There he negotiated the delivery of liquefied gas – despite all of the country's human rights violations.
The German population also has pronounced reservations about a comprehensive energy embargo against Russia.
This is shown by a survey by the opinion research institute Civey on behalf of SPIEGEL.
Above all, a relative majority of Germans reject an immediate stop to Russian gas supplies: 48 percent are against it.
Just over 40 percent answered the corresponding question about an import ban with "yes" or "rather yes", around eleven percent are undecided.
There seems to have been a change of opinion on this question in recent weeks.
As recently as March 3, shortly after the outbreak of war, 60 percent of Germans voted in a Civey poll for Wirtschaftswoche that the federal government should stop all gas imports from Russia.
However, at that time there was no question as to whether the stops should take place
immediately
, which somewhat limits the comparability of the answers.
In the current SPIEGEL survey, it is primarily AfD voters (87 percent) who think a gas embargo is wrong.
In the general debate, faction leader Tino Chrupalla reaffirmed his party's rejection of the sanctions against Russia.
But even among the supporters of the left, the FDP and the Union, rejection is greater than approval.
There was only a clear majority (65 percent) among supporters of the Greens for an immediate stop in deliveries.
The urban-rural divide is also interesting: in densely populated areas there is a higher willingness to stop immediately than in areas with low population density.
The willingness to stop oil imports has also decreased among the population.
According to the SPIEGEL survey, 48 percent of those surveyed still answered in the affirmative - in a SPIEGEL survey from two weeks ago, however, it was still around 54 percent.
Here, too, it is the Greens voters who are in favor of an embargo with a large majority (76 percent).
At the AfD it is only eleven percent.
Again, there is significantly more agreement (60 percent) in very densely populated areas than in areas with very low population density (40 percent).
The clearest approval for an import ban is in the case of coal: 59 percent answer "yes" or "rather yes".
And again it is the Greens supporters who show the greatest willingness to do so.
So far, Russia has been Germany's most important energy supplier.
In 2020, the Federal Republic imported 56.3 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas, which corresponded to around 55 percent of imports.
According to the Federal Ministry of Economics, this proportion remained roughly the same in 2021.
In addition, Germany imported a good 28 million tons of crude oil from Russia in 2020, which corresponded to around a third of crude oil imports.
Half of the imported coal also comes from Russia.
bka