Germany funds “political” NGOs that work to undermine the French nuclear sector, Poland’s biznesalert.pl website reported on Thursday.
It said the strategy employed by Berlin was described in a recent article by France’s weekly magazine L’Express.
The French magazine wrote on Monday that such NGOs, including the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, “don't make the headlines, yet they are deliberately weakening the French nuclear industry,” according to biznesalert.pl.
L’Express said, as quoted by biznesalert.pl, that "their weapons" included "drafting documents with an anti-nuclear narrative, guiding elites through training courses - doctoral grants, masterclasses, etc. - visiting and meeting foreign politicians, and forming alliances with certain NGOs or environmentalist parties.”
According to the French weekly, the German parliament has steadily increased funding for such “political foundations,” from EUR 295 million in 2000 to EUR 466 million in 2014 and EUR 690 million in 2023, biznesalert.pl reported.
L’Express quoted French expert Christian Harbulot as saying that “Germany is doing everything in its power to prevent French industry from benefiting from cheap energy and thus gaining a major competitive advantage,” while “with foundations such as Heinrich Böll, which has an address in Paris, the undermining work is also being carried out on French soil,” biznesalert.pl said.
German foundation critical of Poland’s nuclear policy?
Meanwhile, the Heinrich Böll Foundation is also active in Poland, and in 2020 it published a paper criticising Poland’s plan to develop nuclear energy, citing “high costs, long implementation period and incompatibility of nuclear energy with European Union trends,” biznesalert.pl reported.
The website noted that the Polish government plans to launch the country’s first nuclear reactor, using American AP1000 reactor technology, at a site in northern Poland in 2033.
Poland seeks to have at least 6-9 GW of nuclear energy capacity by 2043, according to biznesalert.pl.
There are also plans to build a public-private nuclear facility using South Korean APR1400 technology and to deploy small modular reactors (SMR) in Poland, biznesalert.pl reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: biznesalert.pl, L’Express, pl.boell.org
