German Green leaders resign after dismal election results

BERLIN — The leaders of Germany’s Greens on Wednesday announced that they will step down following a string of poor election results that have sparked a full-fledged crisis within the party.

“New faces are needed to lead the party out of this crisis,” Ricarda Lang, one of the two current leaders of the party, told reporters.

In a key election in the eastern region of Brandenburg on Sunday, the Greens crashed out of the state parliament, winning just around 4 percent of the vote, below the 5-percent threshold needed to gain parliamentary seats and a drop of nearly 7 percentage points from the last election in the state five years ago.

Those results followed other poor outcomes for the party in state elections earlier this month and in the European election in June. The Greens are currently polling at 10 percent nationally, nearly 5 percentage points below their result in the last federal election in 2021.

Sunday’s election results in Brandenburg illustrated the Greens are mired in “the deepest crisis our party has faced in a decade,” Omid Nouripour, the other leader of the Greens, told reporters.

The Greens have seen their support drop as voters have turned much of their attention away from the party’s core issue of fighting climate change and have increasingly turned their focus to immigration, security and the consequences of the war in Ukraine.

Persistent infighting within the three-party coalition government — which includes the Greens, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the fiscally-conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) — has also taken a toll. The three parties have clashed on everything from military aid for Ukraine to a scheme, promoted by the Greens, to replace gas boilers with heat pumps.

Many voters, particularly on the far right, came to see that last measure as a symbol of the Greens’ overreach when it comes to environmental regulations. The Greens’ ambitious push for a clean energy transition has also come under scrutiny given high electricity costs, which have contributed to an exodus of major industry.

The party is now looking to change course one year ahead of a federal election. That is likely to be a difficult task given that all three parties in Germany’s ruling coalition are seeking to revive their political fortunes by doubling down on key aspects of their often-conflicting core policy agendas — a dynamic that will likely fuel more infighting and could spur the collapse of the already teetering government.

Evidence of this retrenchment inside the coalition was already on display Wednesday as Scholz, Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck, and FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner were set to meet to try to come to an agreement on the latest issue over which they are at loggerheads: What to do with €9.9 billion that was originally set aside to subsidize an Intel chip factory to be built in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. Following Intel’s announcement that it will push back construction on the project, the money is now available to be used elsewhere.

But the coalition leaders, as so many times before, are apparently struggling to reach a compromise on how to spend the funds. Habeck reportedly wants the unused money to remain in a fund Berlin relies on to finance its climate and industrial agenda, while Lindner — who is seeking to burnish his credentials as a fiscal hawk — wants to use the sum to plug a gap in the government’s finances, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported.

For both Lindner and Habeck, who is set to run as the Greens’ chancellor candidate for the 2025 federal election, the matter strikes at the heart of their efforts to rebuild their eroding support.

For the Greens, a new leadership duo tasked with reviving the party is set to be elected during a party conference in mid November. Although no candidates have come forward as of yet, three politicians inside the party named Franziska Brantner, a state secretary in Habeck’s ministry, as one probable candidate.

This article has been updated.