Angela Merkel’s government is facing growing calls from business leaders to postpone plans to phase out nuclear power in Germany in order to protect the environment.

The chief executive of Volkswagen and the chairman Continental AG, a leading car parts manufacturer, are among those to speak out in recent weeks.

They have seized on the climate movement of 2019 as an opportunity to argue in favour of nuclear energy, and warn shutting down Germany’s last reactors could leave the country reliant on highly pollutant brown coal.

Mrs Merkel pledged to shut down all of Germany’s nuclear reactors by 2022 in the wake of a public outcry following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

But critics say it was too ambitious to switch to renewable energy and phase out nuclear power at the same time. With renewables unable to make up the shortfall, Germany has been forced to turn to coal.

“If climate protection really matters to us, the nuclear power plants need to run longer,” Herbert Diess, the VW chief executive, told Tagesspiegel newspaper.

“The priorities are the wrong way round: first we need to get out of coal, and then out of nuclear power.”