Why France Kept Nuclear Power While Germany Walked Away

Two neighboring European countries with similar populations, comparable economies, and shared borders made opposite choices about nuclear energy. France still generates roughly 74 percent of its domestic electricity from nuclear reactors, while Germany shut down its last civilian plants in April 2023, ending a decades-long phase-out. A new comparative study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy argues that this divergence is not accidental, and that it can be traced to a specific combination of political institutions, public opinion, and the availability of renewable energy alternatives.

The research team, led by Jungwoo Chun of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology together with Soraya Touimi-Benjelloun of Sciences Po Bordeaux and Suh-Yong Chung of Korea University, applied McAdam’s theory of the political opportunity structure to the two countries and then extended it. Their revised framework adds two variables that earlier accounts often treated as background noise: measurable shifts in public opinion and the scale of each country’s renewable energy capacity. The findings suggest that while institutional structure still carries strong explanatory power, the different policy outcomes also reflect how citizens mobilized, how parliaments debated, and how easily each nation could substitute renewables for atomic power.

The historical roots of the split run deep. In France, nuclear energy became entangled with national identity after the trauma of 1940, when German troops entered the country for the second time in less than thirty years. The Provisional Government created the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique in October 1945 to rebuild technological prestige, and experts presented the nuclear program as the solution to France’s postwar challenges. The National Assembly approved the first nuclear plan in 1952, and by 1954 the CEA and the national utility EDF had divided the work of designing and operating reactors.

The 1973 oil shock cemented this trajectory. When OPEC raised oil prices by 70 percent and cut production in response to Western support for Israel, Prime Minister Pierre Messmer announced on television in March 1974 that France would accelerate its civil nuclear program with the construction of thirteen reactors. Half a century later, President Macron continued that legacy with a 2023 law promoting nuclear power as one of three priorities for reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, accelerating new reactor construction and extending the lifespans of existing plants.

Germany’s story unfolded differently. The first public rupture came in 1975, when a citizens’ initiative formed to stop a power plant near Whyl in Baden-Württemberg, sparking demonstrations across the country and highlighting nuclear dangers. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster profoundly deepened anti-nuclear sentiment, and in 1998 a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens negotiated an agreement with energy companies to phase out nuclear power in the 2020s. When the Fukushima disaster struck in 2011, the German government responded within days, announcing a three-month moratorium, shutting down the eight oldest reactors, and forming a commission to inspect every remaining plant. The final three facilities—Isar 2, Emsland, and Neckarwestheim 2—went offline in April 2023.

To explain why these two societies reacted so differently to similar technologies and risks, the researchers examined the formal architecture of political access. Germany is a federal parliamentary republic with a decentralized court system structured across three hierarchical levels, connected to both national and regional governments. That gave the German anti-nuclear movement considerably more entry points into the legal system than its French counterpart enjoyed. France, by contrast, operates a highly centralized judiciary overseen by the Ministry of Justice, and its unitary state structure leaves little room for the kind of local direct democracy—citizen-initiated referendums known as Bürgerbegehren—that allowed German activists to build momentum from the municipal level upward.

Electoral rules amplified the difference. France uses a non-proportional, two-ballot plurality system that institutionalizes the sidelining of minority environmental parties, while Germany’s mixed-member proportional representation allows any party winning at least 5 percent of the vote to hold seats. This is how the German Greens entered parliament and actively blocked nuclear development, a pathway that was structurally closed in France. Earlier scholarship by Herbert Kitschelt classified France as a strong, closed state in which the executive dominates policymaking, and Germany as a weak, closed state with more permeable institutions—categories that still map onto the nuclear outcomes observed decades later.

Public opinion, the study’s first added variable, reinforced these institutional asymmetries. A September 2022 survey found that 75 percent of French respondents favored nuclear energy and 65 percent supported building new plants. In Germany, the picture was nearly inverted: in April 2011, shortly after Fukushima, 90 percent of respondents to the Deutschlandtrend survey supported a complete phase-out, and even before the accident a 2009 Eurobarometer survey showed Germany was one of only three EU countries where a majority wanted to reduce nuclear power. The researchers also point to political cleavages: in France, traditional labor-focused movements dominate protest activity, with new social movements making up only about a third of the total, whereas in Germany new movements—including the anti-nuclear campaign that began gaining momentum in the 1970s—became prominent vehicles for collective action. Parliamentary discourse mirrored these splits. French debates framed nuclear energy as a tool of independence, growth, and environmental protection, with waste treated as a solvable future problem, while German debates split into pro- and anti-nuclear camps, with opponents invoking an

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of nuclear energy policy divergence between France and Germany

Article Title: What explains the difference in nuclear energy policies? A comparison between France and Germany

Article References: What explains the difference in nuclear energy policies? A comparison between France and Germany. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1871823

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1871823

Keywords: nuclear energy, France, Germany, energy policy, political opportunity structure, public opinion, renewable energy, energy transition, Chernobyl, Fukushima, carbon neutrality, Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy