German Greens’ top leadership resignation and Robert Habeck’s rise to power

Brussels – After the severe defeats at the last regional elections, a season of profound changes is opening for the German Greens. The environmentalists’ top leadership, including co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, has resigned, but the new team and policy will be announced at the national congress in a couple of months. According to local newspaper reconstructions, the hands of Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a point of reference of the “realists” who would like to scale back the influence of the party’s left wing, are being stretched over the organization.

Resigning leadership

A total reset: this is what the German Greens need after suffering their worst poll defeats in at least a decade. This is what the party’s two leaders, Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, argued when they announced their resignations on Wednesday morning (Sept. 25) following the disastrous outcomes of the regional vote in Thuringia and Brandenburg in recent weeks. 

The entire Federal Executive Committee will also resign, having determined, according to a note, “that the time has come to entrust the fate of this great party to new hands.” The resignation will take effect as of the party congress scheduled for mid-November in Wiesbaden (the capital of Hesse), from which is to emerge not only the new leadership but also the new political line to be followed to present itself at the federal elections in September 2025.

The crushing defeat in the ballot box

The débâcle of the environmentalists in the elections in the eastern Länder held in September was traumatic: in Thuringia, they remained stuck at 3.8 per cent of the consensus, and in Brandenburg, they stopped at 4.1 per cent, missing the 5 per cent threshold in both cases and being ousted not only from governments but also from the state parliament. They made it by a whisker in Saxony, standing at 5.3 per cent. It has been a total defeat for one of the three parties participating in the government of Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which it had entered after gaining nearly 15 per cent nationwide in the September 2021 legislative elections. 

To tell the truth, all members of the Semaphore coalition (SPD, Greens, and the liberal FDP) suffered heavy losses in this election round. The real winners were the ethno-nationalist ultra-right of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the red-brown left of Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), two anti-system parties that have tapped into a deep discontent widespread among the population, which for historical reasons is more pronounced in the former DDR regions. The success of these two new political entities has led many centre-left voters to opt for the tactical vote, in many cases preferring the SPD to the ecologists. Even at the European elections last June, the Grünen fared poorly, plummeting from 20.5 per cent in 2019 to less than 12 per cent this year. 

The negative trend of environmentalists is certainly not a uniquely German dynamic, but this collapse in support has been particularly conspicuous in Germany. Analysts agree that at the root of this disappointing performance, to say the least, is involvement in a litigious federal government that has been struggling to manage its response to the war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis, and that is adopting increasingly hard-line positions on security and immigration issues. 

One episode specifically seems to have broken the public’s faith in the Greens: the enactment in January this year of a measure mandating the sustainable production of at least 65 per cent of the energy used by households and businesses from new installations. A law (dubbed “of the heat pumps”) that critics believe is imbued with ecological ideological stringency, unable to consider the economic and social sustainability of the measures needed to achieve it.

Habeck’s rise

Looming over the party’s future, at least according to the German newspaper Spiegel, is the long shadow of the current Economy Minister Robert Habeck. Together with the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, the vice chancellor is the most prominent figure of the German ecologists and the main reference of the area of the so-called realists, who advocate the need to soften some positions deemed ideological and defended instead by the party’s more radical wing (which identifies with the traditional battles of progressive forces, especially on social issues), in the name of government pragmatism. 

According to background reports circulating in the German press, the vice chancellor reportedly used the recent electoral debacle to shift the responsibility for their political choices onto the current leadership and to tighten his grip on the party further. The resignations of Lang and Nouripour, which took almost everyone by surprise, were allegedly imposed by Habeck himself, who had long wanted to blow off the heads of the two co-chairs to re-position the Greens closer to the centre and perhaps steal some voters from the CDU. 

A new course that did not please the party’s youth section, whose leaders defected en masse, claiming that the organization’s line had softened too much. An event that should be considered alongside the dynamics of the vote: in Brandenburg, which has been ruled stably by the centre-left for decades, the Greens’ support in the demographic bracket between the ages of 16 and 24 dropped by 24 per cent.

What happens now?

Franziska Brantner, undersecretary of state in the ministry run by Habeck and bigwig of the realist wing, is one of the most prominent names for the succession to Lang and Nouripour. From the progressive area, on the other hand, the profiles of Andreas Audretsch (outgoing vice chairman of the party) and Felix Banaszak (former president of the Northern Westphalia Länd) would be emerging: both are on very good terms with the minister, although advocating a more staunchly left-wing economic policy that maintains a focus on social and climate issues. 

It seems that the annoyances are already there. In the coming months, it will be known who will come out on top and what the faces of the new Green leadership will be. In the meantime, it is increasingly likely that Habeck will get the party’s nomination to challenge Friedrich Merz (leader of the CDU) to the chancellorship in September 2025. Polls in hand, the Christian Democrats’ support is around 30 per cent, while the environmentalists barely touch 10: the post of head of government may be an exaggerated ambition for Habeck, but an alliance to form a government should not be ruled out a priori, even if the Greens get stuck in the throat of many within the CDU (and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU).