Germany: Government crisis deepens as Green leaders resign

Germany's Green Party is going from crisis to crisis. Three days after regional elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg delivered a stinging defeat to the party, its entire leadership has resigned. Now, the party will have to choose a replacement at its party conference in November. Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour will have held their positions for a year less than was originally intended.

In the elections in Brandenburg, the Greens failed to gain the 5% of votes that a party needs in Germany to enter a legislature. The same happened to them in Thuringia at the start of September. Only in Saxony, which also chose a new state parliament, did they succeed in crossing the threshold — just.

What is particularly bitter for the Greens is that they had previously formed part of the coalition governments in all three states.

Constant bickering in the federal coalition

Now more than ever, there are questions hanging over the future of the federal government. The coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens is in a constant state of crisis. The alliance has never stopped bickering among itself.

The coalition parties argue about weapons deliveries to Ukraine as it fights off the aggressor Russia, the so-called debt brake enshrined in the German constitution, and policies related to climate protection and social welfare.

Against this background, Nouripour, the Green co-chair who is stepping down, has spoken of "the most profound crisis in our party for a decade."

Many questions

The crisis does not just have to do with the fate of just one party, said Nouripour, who came to Germany from Iran in 1988 at the age of 13. The Green politician says he now wonders whether it will still be possible to come up with "good policies" for "peace, for freedom, for justice, for prosperity and for climate protection" in Germany.

Nouripour's co-chair, Lang, described the joint resignation as Green leaders as a possible building block for a strategic revamp of the party, already with an eye to the national elections in September 2025.

"We will decide how Germany will develop in future. And we will also decide a little what this country really wants to be," she said.

Two pictures of Germany

Lang sees Germany as being at a crossroads: "A country in which we keep a course of climate neutrality and protect our prosperity and social cohesion — today and tomorrow. Or a country in which those prevail who only want to go backward with all of that." Lang did not say what parties and people she meant with this latter sentence.

She said she was very worried about her own party in view of the series of election defeats and the bad image of the federal government. The party is also deciding on what role the Greens will take on in future in a party system that is currently changing in a fundamental way "as we have already seen in many other European countries," Lang said.

Continuing decline

This development was already apparent at the European Parliament elections in June.  Far-right parties were very successful, while the German Greens were forced to swallow bitter losses. Their proportion of votes almost halved from 20.5% in 2019 to just 11.9%. Lang and Nouripour have now drawn their consequences from this downward trend.

There is widespread speculation as to what impact this could have on the federal government. Alongside Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Economy Minister Robert Habeck is the best-known face among the Greens.

"Hard months are behind us; the Greens are very much facing a headwind," said Habeck. He believes that the defeats at the recent elections were certainly influenced by trends at the federal level. 

"We all bear responsibility here, me as well. And I will also face up to it."

In the current DeutschlandTrend survey by public broadcaster ARD, the Greens are at 11%. The Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) are polling top with 33%.

Scholz is not worried

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says he is sure that the turbulence in the Green Party will have no impact on the coalition. According to government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit, Scholz regrets the decision by Lang and Nouripour and said he had "worked closely and trustingly" with them. But it was a part of democratic processes that party leaderships sometimes change, Scholz was quoted as saying.

Analysts like the Aachen political scientist Emanuel Richter wonder, however, what signal is meant to be sent by the resignation of the Green leadership. "After all, it is not as if the failures had to do with the two who were leading the party," he said in an interview with the public broadcaster Phoenix.

A communication problem?

Richter feels that the Greens' agenda and their manner of communicating are rather to blame. As an example, he named the government's so-called heating law, which was the brainchild of Economy Minister Habeck. The gradual transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies that it planned to bring about caused much uncertainty in the general public and the business sector.

These are the points where the Greens need to improve so as to get away from the perception that they are a party of "thou shalt not" that rigidly implements its ideological policies without paying attention to failures and circumstances on the ground, Richter said.

This article was translated from German.

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