The
stark warning comes as the haggling between would-be Chancellor
Olaf Scholz's centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and
the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) entered the final
straight.
Robert Habeck told public broadcaster RBB the government that
succeeds Angela Merkel's outgoing conservative-led
administration must be a "climate government", committed to the
Paris Climate Agreement target of capping the global average
temperature increase at 1.5 degrees by 2100.
"If we don't manage that - 1.5 degrees is our yardstick, it's in
our provisional agreement ... then we have failed in the
coalition talks," he said.
His comments came as the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow entered
what was scheduled to be a final day of bargaining over how to
stop global warming from becoming catastrophic.
Next week, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP will assess the
agreements made in coalition talks on a whole range of policy
areas and decide how to proceed with government-building.
A collapse in the talks would plunge Germany, and the European
Union of which it is by far the richest and most populous
member, into deep crisis.
The more fragmented parliament returned by voters in September's
election makes for complicated coalition arithmetic.
Among the few alternatives would be a repeat of the grand
coalition that has ruled Germany for the past eight years,
though this time under SPD instead of conservative leadership.
Few in either party want this.
In a sign of their disquiet over the results of climate policy
talks, the Greens' leadership last week wrote to a range of
activist groups asking them to pressure the other two parties to
beef up their climate protection policy.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt, editing by Andrei Khalip)
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