The leadership of the German Green Party, one of the three pillars of the three-party government in Berlin, announced its resignation on Wednesday after suffering a series of humiliating electoral defeats. One year before the general election in which the conservatives are the favourites, the decision aggravates the crisis in the coalition of Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The recent regional elections have not left Scholz in a good position either, despite his party’s victory in Brandenburg on Sunday. They have led the liberals, the third pillar of the government, to step up their threats to slam the door and call early elections.
The Greens, said their co-president Omid Nouripour when announcing their resignation, are “in the worst crisis in a decade.” Co-president Ricarda Lang added: “New faces are needed to lead the party out of the crisis.” Both will remain in office until the party congress scheduled for next November.
The resignation follows a loss of support in the European elections in June and in the regional elections in September in three federal states in the former German Democratic Republic. In Thuringia and Brandenburg, the Greens were excluded from the regional parliaments after obtaining less than 5% of the votes.
The party of Vice-Chancellor and Economics Minister Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was the worst-off in the regional elections due to the “useful vote”. Many green voters voted for the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats to curb the far right.
That was not the only reason. The Greens have been feeling the effects of a weakening of their power since they formed a government with Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) after the 2021 parliamentary elections. Unpopular measures such as the phasing out of gas, coal and diesel boilers have made them the main target of criticism from the right.
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For a part of the population, they are the party of urbanites disconnected from the concerns of the majority. Of the main parties, they are now the only ones in favour of a liberal immigration policy and the most determined in their support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion, issues on which they also go against the grain of a sector of public opinion.
The Greens thought they had reached the top a few years ago, before the 2021 elections, when the polls were smiling on them and many already saw their candidate Baerbock as chancellor. They did not go that far, but they did become the second party in the coalition in votes and deputies.
The polls now give them around 10% of the vote. One consolation is that their other partners are not doing much better. The SPD saved their face in Brandenburg, but polls for the general elections put them in third place, behind the CDU/CSU and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The other partner, the FDP, has been reduced in the countries Easterners to the rank of testimonial force, with little more than 1% of votes, or less. Today the liberals are no more, according to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitungwhich is “a West German clientelist party”, focused on specific issues such as public finances and with a limited electorate and ambitions in a given territory. And they threaten to break up the government if Scholz does not meet their demands in the budget negotiations.
“The centrifugal forces of the traffic light “The number of votes is increasing,” Christian Democrat leader Thorsten Frei told Reuters. “With the Greens’ leadership stepping down, the coalition is falling apart in front of the television cameras.”
