Elephants trample on German coalition’s fragile vibes

20,000 African elephants are stampeding on Germany’s brittle coalition government.

A week after Botswana’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, accused Germany of being neocolonialist for its stance on elephant conservation, a liberal Bundestag member is now also taking aim at Berlin’s anti-trophy hunting eco-warriors, providing the three-party coalition with yet another issue to fight over.

“Our environment ministry shouldn’t turn their own ideas into the standard for the world just because we are Europe,” Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician Christoph Hoffmann told POLITICO. “There have been accusations of neocolonialism from African countries for valid reasons.”

The row was sparked last week when Botswana’s president threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany, in protest against a proposal by Berlin’s environment ministry — led by the Greens’ Steffi Lemke — to restrict the import of elephant hunting trophies.

Germany is one of the biggest importers of such trophies in the EU and Botswana encourages trophy hunting because, its leaders argue, conservation has led to elephant overpopulation; Masisi has called the elephant numbers a “plague.”

Hoffmann’s broadside arrives as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fragile coalition has been wracked with tensions in recent months. Relations between the parties — Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the liberal FDP — have deteriorated due to disagreements over issues such as spending and military aid for Ukraine.

“Europe has somehow not yet fully understood that it is no longer the dominant purchasing power it once was,” Hoffmann said. The planned measures by the environment ministry “demonstrate a lack of knowledge of local species protection,” he added.

“You have to take off your rose-colored glasses and accept practices in other countries as they are,” he said. “The alternative would be poaching and uncontrolled shooting by local residents — there is no way this can be in our interest.”

Like its European neighbors, Germany has a tortured colonial history in Africa.

While Germany started colonizing other countries comparatively late — at the end of the 19th century, hundreds of years after other European nations — its colonial empire in Africa and Asia was considered the third biggest by 1914.

Germany was forced to give up its colonies after World War I, and to this day, it has struggled to confront its colonial past and create a culture of remembrance related to atrocities it committed, particularly in modern-day Namibia. In 2021, it recognized atrocities against the Herero and Nama people in modern-day Namibia  as a genocide.

Instead of imposing more trade restrictions on hunting trophies, European countries — and especially Germany — should focus on “dialogue,” Hoffmann said. “People are still using old, simplistic narratives because they’re easy to sell and justify domestically,” he said.

Elephants crossing the road packed with the trucks waiting to cross the river over the Kazungula bridge in Kazungula, Botswana | Monirul Bhuiyan/AFP via Getty Images

“I am convinced that only national laws and their enforcement on the ground can really solve the problem,” Hoffmann said, referring to European countries’ attempts to solve African issues from afar. “So this indirect route via the retail chains will be difficult because there are others who will buy the trophies,” he said.

Not asking for people’s expertise on issues that mostly concern them “was in principle an authoritarian approach that is simply brazen,” Hoffmann said.

There are two species of African elephants — savanna elephants and forest elephants. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature considers savanna elephants to be endangered and forest elephants to be critically endangered.

A German environment ministry spokesperson told POLITICO that Botswana’s environment minister, Dumezdweni Mthimkhuluand, and his German counterpart, Lemke, exchanged their respective views during a conversation in March.

The spokesperson stressed that there is an ongoing dialogue with Botswana and other countries affected by changes to trophy-hunting import rules.

Lemke “has signaled that she will accept Botswana’s invitation (to visit Botswana and assess the situation herself) if an opportunity arises,” the email said. “There is a diverse and regular exchange between the minister and African colleagues.”