"The most serious crisis in 10 years": That's how the leaders of Germany's Green Party justified their collective resignation at a last-minute press conference on Wednesday, September 25. MPs Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang, who had led the party since 2022, along with its entire federal office, stepped down following a series of electoral defeats suffered by the Greens.
The disastrous results at the last three regional polls in September, in which the Greens were ousted from the Thuringia and Brandenburg parliaments, where they had nonetheless sat for 15 years, confirmed the party's decline. The downward trend was already clearly visible at the European elections in June 2024, where their vote share nearly halved its result compared with 2019, to less than 12%. "We need new faces to lead the party out of the crisis," said Lang, with Nouripour accepting responsibility. Their resignations will take effect at the 50th party congress to be held in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, in mid-November.
The resounding departure from the leadership of the party, which has been part of the ruling coalition in Berlin since 2021, has come at a time of great fragility for the coalition, weakened by internal divisions and the rise of the far right in recent elections. Like the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens openly doubt the coalition's future. "The great feng shui moment will never happen again," Nouripour said on Monday, implying that the governing parties were no longer capable of compromise.
"This has no impact on the coalition," said Chancellor Olaf Scholz's spokesman on Wednesday morning, downplaying the significance of the crisis within the German Green Party, while the conservative opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) called for early federal elections.
The downward spiral of the German Greens, one of Europe's oldest and most influential environmental parties, is part of a wider trend in Europe, as demonstrated by the European elections in June. "In Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, environmentalists have been penalized by the rise of populist parties that have placed immigration at the heart of the public debate, to the detriment of issues such as climate protection and the environment," said Daniel Boy, director of Research Emeritus at the Sciences Po Political Research Centre (CEVIPOF) and a specialist in political ecology in Europe. "The Greens have always been very open on immigration."
In a Europe reeling from two years of inflation, "they also come up against the contradiction between economics and environment." The abandonment of nuclear power in Germany, advocated by the Greens and effective since 2023, remains a subject of debate in Germany, particularly in view of soaring energy prices. According to some polls, more than half of Germans believe that abandoning nuclear power for good is a mistake.
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