With their meager result of 4.1 percent and without their own direct mandate, the Greens will not enter the state parliament.
A continuation of the Kenya coalition of the SPD, CDU and Greens is therefore off the table. No more parliamentary mandates, no more two ministerial posts as before. It is a tough blow for the alliance party.
“We are of course sobered and disappointed after this election result, but at the same time we are determined to build a really strong extra-parliamentary opposition,” Benjamin Raschke, one of two Green Party top candidates in Brandenburg, told our editorial team. This election has produced a “horror state parliament” in which only the SPD, AfD, BSW and CDU are still represented. The AfD could use its blocking minority to drive everyone else ahead of it and block them, warned the Green Party politician. “This state parliament is completely dysfunctional, ecological and social issues are completely neglected. The Greens are needed, even outside of parliament,” said Raschke.
The election result is not only bitter for the Green Party’s regional association, whose result was more than halved compared to 2019, at minus 6.6 percentage points. It is also bitter for the Greens at the federal level and for Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck. He has so far refrained from publicly declaring his desire to run as a top candidate or even as a candidate for chancellor in the federal election. The decision is unlikely to be any easier for Habeck after this last state election of the year, on the contrary. Although it is actually clear to everyone that it will end up being Habeck’s, at least since his potential competitor, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, announced that she was withdrawing.
How Habeck and the federal Greens plan to turn the miserable mood around and come up with a positive narrative for the federal election campaign is still completely unclear. On Monday, in any case, the party was not in a position to really limit the damage; the debacle in Brandenburg was too great.
The Greens repeatedly pointed to the escalation in the election campaign between Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke’s SPD and the AfD as the reason for their own poor performance. In fact, according to a survey by Infratest Dimap, 47,000 voters switched from the Greens to the SPD – more than any other party. The SPD was only able to benefit more from winning back non-voters (51,000 according to the survey). On Monday, however, Green Party leader Omid Nouripour made no secret of the poor federal trend: “We know that we have a coalition in which a lot of good things are being done and that this is being talked down in the open. And that simply doesn’t help anyone.”
JANA WOLF
