German Greens leaders resign after dismal election results

BERLIN — The leaders of Germany’s Greens on Tuesday 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.

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 resignations are to take effect in November, when the Greens will hold their party conference in the city of Wiesbaden.

The Green politicians who takeover the leadership posts will be confronted with the formidable task of winning back the party’s lost popularity ahead of a federal election to take place one year from now.

The Greens are currently polling at 10 percent nationally, nearly 5 percentage points below their result in the last federal election in 2021.