WHEN YOU BECOME THE STATE

German Greens in doldrums over bitter compromises


By AFP
Published June 17, 2023

Rows over issues such as the reopening of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine have created divisions inside the Greens - Copyright AFP/File Lars Hagberg

Femke COLBORNE

When Germany’s ecologist Greens hold a mini-party congress Saturday, members of the junior coalition party are expected to vent their fury over tradeoffs that have sent the party’s popularity plunging.

From concessions on coal to clashes with climate protesters, the party has repeatedly found itself on the defensive since entering Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Matters have come to a head in recent weeks, with a painful compromise on European Union migration measures and a row over gas boilers.

“The situation for the party has not been as dangerous for many years as it is this summer,” the NTV broadcaster said in a recent report.

The German Greens scored their best-ever election result in 2021, becoming the third-largest party in parliament and entering the government for the first time since 2005.

But critics in the party say it has sacrificed its founding principles to govern in an awkward coalition with Scholz’s centre-left SPD and the pro-business FDP.

Ahead of the congress, opinion polls put the Greens in fourth place behind the resurgent far-right AfD.

Anger boiled over when EU nations last week reached agreement on a long-stalled revision of their rules on migration. They included plans to introduce fast-track asylum procedures on the bloc’s external borders.

The deal was a crushing blow for the Greens, who had been pushing for more lenient rules for families with children, among other things.

– ‘Low point for Greens’ –

Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock defended voting for the changes. “If Germany had rejected the reform or abstained, it would have meant more suffering, not less,” she argued.

But many party members remain furious.

“It was the wrong decision and we should admit that at the weekend,” Greta Garlichs, leader of the Greens in Lower Saxony, told Stern magazine on Friday.

The mood among the party’s grassroots supporters is “pretty dire”, she said.

The Greens have also run into trouble over a controversial heating law championed by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, of the Greens.

The law, finally introduced in parliament this week after months of infighting within the coalition government, effectively bans new oil and gas boilers from 2028 in favour of more climate-friendly but expensive solutions.

But the text was only agreed after hefty concessions from the Greens, including pushing back the start date by four years.

Habeck defended the policy in parliament on Thursday, insisting “the core of the law remains intact”.

But Die Welt daily described it as a “low point for the once so radiant Greens” and a “resounding defeat” for the party.

As recently as May 2022, Habeck was one of Germany’s most popular politicians.

But the ZDF broadcaster noted in a recent report that he had undergone a “transformation from communications talent to crisis manager and now bogeyman”.

– Accusations of nepotism –

The three-way coalition had never looked like a match made in heaven for the Greens.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis have made that partnership even more difficult than they might have imagined.

To help compensate for a shortfall in Russian gas deliveries, the government voted last year to restart mothballed coal-fired power plants — much to the ire of climate activists.

The expansion of the Garzweiler open-cast coal mine proved a particular flashpoint, with protesters occupying the village of Luetzerath as clearance work began in January.

Being in government has been a “very sobering experience” for the Greens, Ursula Muench, a political scientist at the Bundeswehr University Munich, told AFP.

“They are hardly succeeding in translating their own convictions on climate, the environment and the protection of species into concrete policies at a time when the climate crisis is worsening,” she said.

The Greens have also been rocked by accusations of nepotism.

An official in Habeck’s economy ministry, Patrick Graichen, was forced to leave his post in May over claims he had handed a plush job to an environmentalist who was the best man at his wedding.

“What happened there reinforces the impression that there is a kind of ‘closed shop’ between politics, the green energy industry and science,” political scientist Hubert Kleinert said in an interview with ZDF.