German Green Party In Crisis – Board Resigns After Election Defeat

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Written by Patrick Poppel, expert at the Center for Geostrategic Studies (Belgrade)

The Greens in Germany are drawing personal conclusions from a series of electoral defeats and are now restructuring the party leadership. The two chairmen Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour announced their withdrawal from the party in Berlin on Wednesday.

The Greens had suffered heavy losses in the last four elections (European elections and the regional elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg). In Brandenburg they had more than halved their result. The party has left two regional parliaments.

Only in the state of Saxony did they narrowly manage to be represented in the state parliament again. “The election result on Sunday in Brandenburg is a testimony to the deepest crisis our party has faced in a decade,” said Nouripour. “It is not about the fate of one party alone.” It is about the fundamental question of whether in Germany, as “the country with the greatest responsibility in the European Union, it will be possible in the future to continue to make good politics for peace, for Freedom, for justice, for prosperity and for climate protection”.

“It takes new faces to lead the party out of this crisis,” Ms Lang said. “Now is not the time to be stuck to your own chair. Now is the time to take responsibility and we are taking that responsibility by enabling a new start,” she added.

Lang and Nouripour were elected chairmen at the end of January 2022. They are relatively popular in the party. Lang and Nouripour did not comment on their successor.

According to media reports, State Secretary for Economic Affairs Franziska Brantner and Bundestag member Felix Banaszak are in discussion. Brantner is a close confidante of Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who could lead the Greens into the next federal election as their candidate for chancellor.

Banaszak was formerly leader of the Green Party in North Rhine-Westphalia and is an important representative of the left wing. The Green Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Robert Habeck called the party executive’s announcement a “great service to the party”.

CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann called on the government to hold early elections. “Our country will not be able to endure this government for another year!” Linnemann told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.

There is no way around new elections. The resignation is a respectable step and the Greens have to fundamentally change their policies, said Linnemann. But how could a party that has become increasingly established in Germany over the last 80 years come to this disastrous point?

Of course, most of the Green Party’s voters are in western Germany and in the big cities. But even there the party faces competition from other left-wing groups. Despite the massive media debate on climate change, which is one of the Greens’ main issues, they suffered such a strong defeat.

Since the AFD (Alternative for Germany) can be seen as the clear winner of all these elections, the question naturally arises as to where the Green voters went. Green voters do not easily vote for a right-wing party. It is therefore very clear that the votes have gone from the political center to the right and the Greens have lost their quota to the center.

But what was the reason for these defeats? Maybe it wasn’t a lack of effort in the election campaign or the constant unprofessional appearances of the Green Foreign Minister. The reason for the problems and possible decline of this party is the increasingly visible distance from its roots. The Green Movement was known for its peace initiatives for decades. And the party has finally moved away from these ideals of peace in recent years.

The harsh words regarding arms deliveries to Ukraine particularly irritated many voters. The Greens used to be against wars and now they are marching at the forefront of escalating forces. Completely absurd political behavior when it comes to migration policy has also led many voters to make a different decision.

When it comes to energy policy, fewer and fewer people trust the Greens. The rise of the AFD and the decline of the Greens show us yet another aspect of German domestic politics. The real political center has clearly shifted to the right and Green voters have moved to the center. Since the consequences of the absurd migration policy and other mistakes will be visible for years to come, this shift from the center to the right will not end any time soon.

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