The leaders of Germany’s Greens, partners in the embattled central government of Olaf Scholz, have announced their resignation, saying that a series of election defeats requires a radical reset.
Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, joint leaders since 2022, said on Wednesday that the environmental party, a trailblazer in Europe and the first to have MPs elected to a national parliament, faced its deepest crisis in a decade after the result of the Brandenburg state election on Sunday.
“It is time to lay our beloved party’s fate in others’ hands,” said Nouripour.
The surprise announcement comes at a time when Germany’s political landscape has been shaken by the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the unexpected success of a fledgling populist leftist-conservative party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).
Support for both those parties led to feverish tactical voting in recent state elections, contributing to the Greens being knocked out of government in Brandenburg and Thuringia and only narrowly escaping a wipeout in Saxony. The party also took a drubbing in June’s European parliamentary elections.
On Wednesday, Lang said the resulting questions over the future direction of the party, especially with a federal election scheduled for a year’s time, were inextricably linked to the question: “What sort of country do we want to be?”
This included whether the government would stick to its agenda to become climate-neutral or “retreat from that altogether”, she said.
Political analysts said the Green leaders’ move would not directly affect Scholz’s government – in which Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock are the leading Green figures, holding the economic and foreign affairs portfolios respectively – but that it would contribute to a general sense of political uncertainty in Germany.
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The three-way coalition’s poll ratings are at a record low, and Scholz has the lowest popularity rating of any chancellor ever.
The German Greens are not the only ones to be struggling across Europe. When Austria goes to the polls at the weekend, the Green party there is expected to perform particularly badly. One of the key issues is the supply of gas, with the Green-led energy ministry under pressure to wean the country off Russian exports, on which Austria is dependent for 83% of its needs, and build up alternative sources instead.
The German Greens have been accused of losing their way, in particular since entering the federal government. Having to deal with the realpolitik of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its resulting energy crisis, has forced the party into making decisions that appeared to go against its ideals. Its support of delivery of military aid to Kyiv has also made it open to ridicule over its apparent abandonment of long-held pacifist principles.
In the recent election campaigns, it often appeared to be the punchbag for parties across the spectrum. Accusations were rife that the party was trying to “dictate” the lives of ordinary Germans – from which type of heating system to use, to which car to drive – with the BSW and AfD going so far as to compare the Greens to the Communist regime of the former German Democratic Republic.
The party has also lost a larger proportion of its younger voters at recent elections than any other party. In Sunday’s Brandenburg poll, for instance, it saw its support in the 16-to-24 age bracket drop by 24 percentage points, a bigger fall than in any other age range.
Lang and Nouripour will remain in post until November, when the party’s annual conference in Wiesbaden will be dominated by the leadership election.
Habeck acknowledged his share of responsibility for the Greens’ election results and welcomed the chance for an open debate over the party’s future.
“The Greens will reorder their ranks to start the catchup ahead of the elections with a new drive,” he said.
