The entire federal executive committee of Germany's Green Party resigned on Wednesday following a series of crushing defeats in local elections. The left-wing party is losing supporters in large numbers amid growing opposition to core parts of its platform, including its environmental policies, support for the war in Ukraine and open borders.
Green party leaders Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang, who announced their early resignations, said the party was in the midst of its “deepest crisis in a decade”.
Their decision to cede control of the party comes after another embarrassing election defeat for the Greens in Brandenburg state elections over the weekend, where they received just 4.1% of the vote, below the 5% threshold to be elected to the state parliament.
This was a repeat of similarly dismal results in Thuringia, where the party also fell short, and Saxony, where a left-wing party just about met the requirement with 5.1 percent of the vote.
Ricarda Lang acknowledged in a comment Reported by Welts“We need new people to save the party from this crisis.”
The Greens, who currently make up a third of Prime Minister Olaf Scholz's “traffic light” coalition government, have seen their support fall sharply due to a deterioration in public attitudes towards issues such as mass immigration and the environment.
This trend is especially evident among younger voters, with the Green Party Loss In Brandenburg, support among 16-24 year olds was an astounding 74.1%, but support among this age group was down 20 percentage points since 2019 to just 7%. Meanwhile, the populist anti-mass immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) increased its share of the young vote by 14 percentage points to 32%.
Recent terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Mannheim and Solingen, forcing Chancellor Olaf Scholz to implement border controls and begin deporting illegal immigrants to Afghanistan for the first time since the Taliban seized control there after U.S. President Joe Biden failed to withdraw U.S. troops in 2021, have turned Germans against the mass immigration party, but the Greens continue to oppose immigration restrictions.
The party's hardline stance on immigration has been criticised by Dietmar Wojtke, Brandenburg's popular leader, who narrowly defeated his local party, the AfD, in weekend elections that led to a split between Berlin's Social Democrat-led government and the AfD. said German Newspapers Welts “I would have expected a more pragmatic stance from the Greens, particularly on immigration,” he said, adding: “Government policy cannot be made contrary to the clear expectations of the people.”
The Greens have also faced backlash over their failure to tackle climate change, which has left Europe's leading economy vulnerable to external shocks such as the war in Ukraine or a major cut in Russian energy supplies. The coalition government also controversially decided in the middle of the energy crisis to go ahead with Green plans to phase out nuclear energy entirely, despite the clean energy success of neighboring France.
Finally, while the Green Party has traditionally been a promoter of peace, the current German Green Party has been one of the main advocates of supporting Kiev in its conflict with Russia. Notoriously, one of Germany's leading Green politicians, Foreign Minister Anna-Lena Barbock, declared in 2022 that the government would continue to provide financial support to Ukraine “no matter what” the German people think.
The electoral problems facing the coalition are not exclusive to the Greens, however, as their fellow traffic light partner, the neoliberal corporatist Free Democrats (FDP), have suffered even worse results than the Greens in recent state elections. Manage It received 1.1 percent of the vote in Thuringia, 0.9 percent in Saxony and 0.8 percent in Brandenburg.
Meanwhile, doubts are growing over whether Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who heads the government in Berlin, will be able to run for a second term. investigation More than two-thirds of Social Democrats said Scholz should step down before next year's general election and choose Defense Minister Boris Pistorius as his successor, while just 21 percent of SDP supporters said they would support Scholz over Pistorius, according to RTL/NTV.
