The entire federal executive board of the German Green party resigned on Wednesday after a string of disastrous regional election results as the leftist party is haemorrhaging voters amid growing opposition to core pillars of its platform such as the green agenda, support for the war in Ukraine, and open borders.
Announcing their early resignation, Green leaders Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang said that the party is in “the deepest crisis in a decade”.
Their decision to cede control of the party comes after yet another embarrassing defeat at the ballot box, with the Greens only managing to win 4.1 per cent of the vote in the Brandenburg elections over the weekend, falling below the five per cent threshold to be represented in the state’s parliament.
This was a repeat of similarly dismal performances in Thuringia, where the party also fell short of the threshold, and in Saxony, where the leftist party barely met the requirement, with 5.1 per cent of the vote.
Ricarda Lang admitted in comments reported by Welt: “New faces are needed to lead the party out of the crisis.”
The Greens, which currently make up one third of the “traffic light” coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have suffered a severe decline in popularity as the public’s attitude towards issues like mass migration and the green agenda have soured.
This trend has been particularly noticeable among young voters, with the Greens losing a staggering 74.1 per cent of its support among 16 to 24 year olds in Brandenburg, falling by 20 percentage points from 2019 to just seven per cent support among the age group. Meanwhile, the anti-mass migration populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) increased its vote share among young people by 14 points to 32 per cent.
While the German people have increasingly turned against the mass migration party, with recent Islamist terror attacks carried out on Mannheim and Solingen, forcing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to enact border controls and begin deportations of illegals back to Afghanistan for the first time since the Taliban takeover of the country in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s bungled withdrawal of American forces in 2021, the Green party has continued to argue against limits on migration.
The intransigence of the party on immigration was criticised by popular Social Democrat leader of Brandenburg Dietmar Woidke, who narrowly defeated the AfD at the weekend elections after distancing the local party from the SPD-led government in Berlin. Woidke told German paper Welt that he would have “expected a more pragmatic attitude from the Greens, especially when it comes to migration,” adding that “you cannot make government policy against the clear expectations of the population.”
The Greens have also faced pushback for failures of its climate agenda, which has left the leading European economy vulnerable to external shocks, notably from the war in Ukraine and the drastic reduction in supplies of Russian energy. The coalition government also controversially decided to push forward with Green Party plans to entirely phase out nuclear energy amid the energy crisis, despite the success of the clean form of energy in neighbouring France.
Finally, while Green parties have traditionally been proponents of peace, the current Green party in Germany has been one of the leading advocates for sponsoring Kyiv in its conflict with Russia. Infamously, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, one of the top Green politicians in the country, declared in 2022 that the government would continue to financially support Ukraine “no matter what” the German voter thinks.
The electoral issues facing coalition parties are not contained to the Greens, however, with fellow traffic light partner, the neo-liberal corporatist Free Democrats (FDP) suffering even worse results in recent state elections than the Green Party, only managing to gain 1.1 per cent of the vote in Thuringia, 0.9 per cent in Saxony, and 0.8 per cent in Brandenburg.
Meanwhile, there are also growing questions about the viability of Chancellor Olaf Scholz seeking a second term at the helm of the government in Berlin. According to a survey from RTL/NTV, over two-thirds of Social Democrat voters said that Scholz should step aside before next year’s federal election in favour of Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, while only 21 per cent of SDP voters said they would back Scholz over the Pistorius.
