Five months before the national elections, a green party that once called itself a rebel of German politics is in an unusually respectable position.
The party’s turnout – second with 21-23% of the vote – means it will nominate a candidate for chancellor on Monday, for the first time in its 41-year history. Moreover, that candidate will have a realistic chance of occupying the top job in German politics by the end of the year.
A once notorious party for painful conferences and ideological quarrels also enters the hot phase of the election race with unusual unity, watching calmly from the sidelines, while its closest competitor, the conservative bloc CDU / CSU, is destroyed of one’s choice.
Co-leaders of the Greens, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, one of whom will be revealed as a candidate for party chancellor, embody a broader cultural shift within the party that first entered the Bundestag in 1983.
“Modern greens are comfortable with the idea of political power and know they have to dock at the political center to get it,” said Wolfgang Merkel, a political scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
“They are very professionally organized and behave with an aura of responsibility that would be expected from a party already in power,” Merkel said. “Greens used to look like they were looking for a program forever. Now they are a party that looks above all like looking for an office. ”
Unlike when the environmental party formed a government with Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005, the biographies of its first line are no longer imbued with the counterculture policy of the 1968 student movement.
Baerbock, 40, has experience in international law and has spent many years regulating the party’s climate and foreign policy behind the scenes. Habeck, 51, was a poetry translator, novelist and philosopher before becoming Schleswig-Holstein’s vice president between 2012 and 2017.
Their party is more academic, more culturally skilled and more comfortable in the middle class than any of its previous iterations – a party for the winners of globalization, some critics say. It is predominantly white, although less so than most other German parties: 15% of its delegates have a migration, the second highest percentage after the left Die Linke.
The drift of the Greens to the political center began in recent times in power, when it did little to mobilize against Schröder’s labor market reforms and allowed German troops to deploy to Kosovo.
But the tectonic change caused major friction between the party’s pragmatist Real and left Meetings factions, which culminated in the bombardment of then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer at a special party congress in 1999 for his support of military engagement.
Under the leadership of Baerbock and Habeck, sling they were silent to the point of inaudibility. The couple worked hard to break his image as The ban party, a party that wants to improve the world by decree.
Along the way for the 2018 Bavarian state election campaign, Habeck has developed a stage routine that begins with him lamenting the consumerist absurdity of every household with its own electric drill, a tool that is unlikely to be used for more than a few minutes in a lifetime. its. Habeck’s coup line: he himself bought an electric drill for each of his four sons as a birthday present.
The message was clear: here was a party that no longer claimed to be more intrinsically virtuous than its electorate. In Baerbock’s words, the new greens are trying to be “radical and state” at the same time.
While Friday’s rise for the future has helped push the Greens’ top topic to the top of the political agenda, the party has worked hard over the past decade to broaden its expertise, poaching talent like former pirate politician Marina Weisband. .
Green party experts appear in political programs on digital rights, pandemic management, financial reform and security policy.
“The Greens have never been a party that cares exclusively about the environment,” said Ulrich Schulte, a journalist for Taz and author of Green power (“Green Power”), a book about the new greens. “During the founding years, they also presented views on disarmament, the alternative economy and women’s rights. But now the Greens manifesto is a wide-ranging supermarket. ”
This extended appeal is also reflected in the era of its voters. When the party first entered the German parliament, most of its votes came from those aged 18 to 24.
However, since 2004, its strongest support in the national elections has come from the 49-59 segment, while the party has not lost touch with younger voters: in the 2019 European elections, greenery were the most popular parties of all groups under 45 years. And with some 68 people now in the over-70s category, the party can hope for supporters across the spectrum.
Young people may still have strengths when it comes to choosing a candidate for chancellery. Baerbock, born in Hanover in 1980, is seen as slowly gaining an edge over her co-leader in the past year.
The former tournament trampoline player has earned his admiration for her tenacity, momentum and soundness, not just among traditional green voters: center-right editor Die Welt recently commented that any CDU candidate would find the politician “a hard nut to crack.” broken “.
“Like her idol [Angela] Merkel, Baerbock is more persevering, tougher and also more reserved than most people assume “, wrote Ulf Poschardt.
The election of Habeck as a candidate for the Greens would signal less a different political direction than a different style. Northern Lübeck has not only continued to be a prolific author since he co-chaired the party – publishing two new non-fiction titles in the last three years – but has developed a new way for politicians to speak in public: reflective, but not obviously pretentious, confident, but also in the face of their own shortcomings.
Approving Habeck in a recent editorial for Die Zeit, European green politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit said a green candidate has a chance to win the election “if he can pass on a change of style to go with the policy change that has was started by Joe Biden, a change that will make Erdoğan, Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping look like the people of yesterday ”.
“Mutual agreements may have more power than these powerful people entail,” said Cohn-Bendit, a strong supporter of the former student body who represents the old Greens’ feelings as few.