© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Germany’s Green Party has foreign policy built into its DNA. The main impulse that led to its foundation more than 40 years ago was the protection of the environment: the global challenge par excellence. Many core issues of Green politics are global and are treated as such: the pursuit of civil liberties and an open, multicultural society, the struggle for human rights and democracy, which can only succeed if these values are shared by as many people and countries as possible, and, not least, the quest for a more equal distribution of wealth and opportunities on a global scale.

The big question of course is how these goals can be achieved. Countless times the party has discussed the policy consequences of its founding tenets, most ardently how to interpret the principle of nonviolence in the light of international crises and mass atrocities.

An overarching understanding has emerged over the last 20 years: we have defined the European Union as the model and the basis of our foreign policy.  The EU is the most successful attempt yet to move beyond national boundaries, to leave behind years of bitter and often violent enmities, to help create freedom and prosperity, and to forge an albeit imperfect consensus on the shared values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. German foreign policy must therefore always be conceived as part of a European foreign policy.

Reforming the UN

We aim to strengthen the rules-based international order under the auspices of the United Nations. With the goal of transforming foreign policy into global domestic policy, we want to reform the workings of the UN. To succeed, the UN and other international organizations must ultimately shed structures that perpetuate power balances dating from the post-World War II era. Yet to achieve this reform we must strengthen the UN—despite its many shortcomings. If we want the power of law instead of the law of the powerful, the UN is the only way to move forward.

For example, the idea of the responsibility to protect is one of the steps on the way to protecting the powerless. It demands that the international community shield those whose own governments cannot or will not defend them from the most egregious forms of violence, first and foremost by political means, but in extreme cases also by military force. Of course, we as Greens have to come to terms with the serious blows this idea has suffered for example in Syria, where the UN Security Council, blocked and unable to act, has once again shirked its responsibility to keep the peace.

Peace and Democracy

Green foreign policy assumes that international peace and the strengthening of democratic values go hand in hand. Today, however, we have to deal with challenges to both peace and democracy. Even in Europe, which we once believed to be a safe haven for democracy and the rule of law, authoritarian movements have been on the rise for the past decade. Paradoxically, these nationalist movements that target the universality of human rights and undermine international rules have quite an outreach. Leaders like Matteo Salvini and Vladimir Putin essentially speak the same language, the one funding the other.

These movements cannot be countered by adopting their language and concerns. A clear commitment to international cooperation, to social and ecological justice, and to the principles of human rights are the only way to win the argument. This includes a clear stance on one of the most contentious issues: migration. In an ever more interconnected world, the idea of closing our borders in order to maintain ethnically homogeneous nation states is clearly absurd. A pragmatic migration policy must take economic, political, and humanitarian aspects into account. It must serve each country’s economic interests, but not exclusively so.

Effective Asylum Systems

Migration policy also has to protect European states from blackmail attempts by authoritarian leaders in Africa and the Middle East who play on the fear of mass migration. They offer to stop migration; in return, Europe is meant to close its eyes to their abusive and authoritarian rule. Their politics, however, are not in our interest. And if we are willing to accept a certain number of migrants from their countries, their threats quickly dissipate. Of course, keeping up the principles of the Geneva Convention is another cornerstone of the values-based approach to foreign policy. The tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea, which we have been witnessing for years now, puts European values to shame. We urgently need a coordinated effort for the rescue and distribution of these migrants and refugees as well as an effective asylum system to decide who can benefit from humanitarian protection.

Diplomacy, civil crisis prevention, as well as economic development are some of the most important tools of such a foreign policy. If Germany and Europe want to take more responsibility on the international stage, we must strengthen our capacities in these fields. This particularly regards the German Foreign Office, which is notoriously understaffed and underfunded.

A Common European Defense

Yet as we have painfully learned, peaceful means are often not enough to keep violent conflict at bay and prevent mass atrocities. In some cases, a military intervention by the international community or parts thereof is necessary as a means of last resort to create space for diplomacy and other civilian efforts.

This means maintaining a capable and efficient military force. Yet arbitrary spending goals, such as NATO’s much-discussed two-percent goal, do not constitute reliable benchmarks. It is far more important to combine forces with our European partners to make our common defense more effective. A similar argument applies to arms exports. Selling weapons to states involved in armed conflicts or human rights abuses on a massive scale may contribute to lowering the price for armaments needed in Europe. However, apart from the obvious moral fallacy of this argument, the political and economic costs of the conflicts fuelled by these weapons in the long term far outweigh any minor gain in the short term.

Reducing Global Inequality

The challenges that our planet is facing are immense. Climate change is the most existential and pressing. But it cannot be addressed in isolation. The changes it requires to many of our habits can only be achieved politically if we can achieve a more equitable distribution of global wealth. This is an integral part of foreign policy. It includes an overhaul of the policies of institutions such as the IMF and a rethinking of international trade relations. Global trade must be organized in a way that reduces rather than exacerbates inequality. European agricultural subsidies, for example, distort agricultural markets in Africa and the Middle East and keep these countries from opening their markets in a way that would benefit both sides.

Climate change is not the only development that has a profound impact on international relations. The new era of digital communication has also changed the traditional role of states in foreign policy. This gives renewed importance to an approach we Greens have favored for a long time: a deepened engagement with civil societies all over the world, both digitally and physically, and a commitment to their freedom of action. The ties resulting from such policies are essential to overcoming many an impasse encountered on other levels.

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Source: EuropeElects

With Germany’s political landscape in upheaval, observers of German politics may be excused for thinking that the world is caving in.

In late May, the troubled Social Democrats (SPD), one of the main political parties both in Germany and in Europe’s wider center-left, suffered a disastrous double blow that underscored the party’s existential crisis. The Social Democrats won only 15.8 percent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, down from 27.3 percent in 2014, finishing behind the Greens for the first time ever in a national election. On the same day, the SPD failed to top the poll in Bremen, coming second to Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in the northern state it has governed for more than seven decades. Shortly afterwards, party leader Andrea Nahles announced her resignation after just a year in office.

The SPD’s collapse has been accompanied by the rising fortunes of the German Greens, who won nearly 21 percent of the vote in the European elections—double their previous result. Crucially, the Greens won the youth vote. Among those under 25, the Greens attracted more voters than the combined tally for the SPD and the CDU, together with their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU). The success of the Greens and the losses of the governing parties were well predicted in the polls, but the results are still bewildering. Opinion polls conducted since have even seen the Greens pushing ahead of the CDU/CSU to 27 percent, making them the main center-left force and the most popular political party in Germany for the first time in history.

The “Greta Effect”

The crisis of the Social Democrats and the rise of the Greens are not unique to Germany, though both effects are particularly strong there. The overall European picture after the elections is marked by a curious divide: In several countries in the north and the center of Europe, the Greens have successfully taken votes away from Social Democratic parties; whereas in the southeast, the Social Democrats seem to be recovering, and the Greens have not done particularly well.

In a similar trend as in Germany, the British Labour Party, the Romanian PSD, and the Austrian SPÖ all suffered disappointing results. The French Socialists (PS), which secured 14 percent of the vote in the 2014 election, were nearly obliterated. In contrast, the French green party EELV surged to a surprising third place, scoring from 8.9 percent to 13.5 percent of the vote. The Greens also reached double figures in several other countries, coming in second in Finland and third in Luxembourg. In the United Kingdom, the Green Party finished ahead of the ruling Conservatives with a score of 11.8 percent. Ireland’s Green Party’s vote trebled in comparison with the 2014 elections, putting it in line to send representatives to the European Parliament for the first time in 20 years. Greens in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands also did well in the wake of recent electoral successes in regional polls, as many young voters increasingly turn away from the center-left to vote for the environmentalist parties.

Only a couple of years back, opinion polls suggested that the Greens were going to see their support halved in the European Parliament. Instead, their total of seats has now gone from 52 to 75, pushing them into a position of influence. Analysts explain this “Green wave” with the “Greta effect,” referring to the teenage Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg. What is certain is that Green parties have benefited from the fact that it was climate change, rather than migration, that dominated the political agenda and the election campaign in many countries.

Europe’s Southeast is Different

Yet not all member states have been hit by the green wave. In fact, it was largely confined to countries in north-western Europe. The Greens’ gains there masked losses in Austria, Spain, and Sweden in the European elections, and the total wipeout of Green MEPs in Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovenia, leaving the Green group unrepresented in 12 out of 28 member states. Indeed, most Green parties across the EU failed to make significant gains compared with 2014.

With a few exceptions, Green parties have not been able to consolidate their presence in the south and east of the EU, “a political reality that even the latest wave of stunning European electoral success has not changed,” according to an analysis by the economic news service Eurointelligence. The Greens won no seats in Eastern Europe and only a handful in southern Europe, where a number of Social Democratic forces have co-opted environmental concerns into their platforms, and thus resisted the green trend, including the main center-left parties in Portugal, Spain, Malta, and Italy.

In Spain, a decisive win for the center-left PSOE, taking 33 percent of the vote, seems to provide evidence of a recovery. This result has made the PSOE the largest national delegation in the S&D group, with 20 MEPs, ahead of the Italian Democratic Party (PD), which is also starting to climb back up according to the latest polls. In Portugal and Malta, the governing parties of Prime Ministers António Costa and Joseph Muscat won by a landslide with 33.4 percent and 54.3 percent of the vote respectively. Polls predict an even bigger win for Portugal’s Costa when he stands for re-election in the fall. The Danish center-left Social Democrats also won the European elections and the subsequent general election held on June 5, though the party’s focus on a more restrictive immigration policy is probably not a model for Europe’s other Social Democrats in crisis. Nonetheless, their win is the third in less than a year for center-left parties in Nordic countries after successes in Sweden and Finland.

Environmentalism may primarily be a concern in north-western Europe, and the Social Democrats may yet experience a comeback in other countries and regions of the the EU. Nevertheless, it is likely that this moment will be remembered as a turning point for the Greens: for the first time, they have taken a place among the big players in the European Parliament.

The post Europe by Numbers: Greens Up, Reds Down appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschnke

Angela Merkel’s government is stumbling toward its end. Her junior coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), is in turmoil after party leader Andrea Nahles threw in the towel on June 2. Merkel’s own conservative bloc is suffering from the inexperience and gaffes of her chosen successor, the new CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

So watch out for early elections in the European Union’s most populous country this fall—which could possibly bring the first Green chancellor in German history to power. For the first time ever, one opinion poll showed the Greens overtaking not only the SPD, but Merkel’s CDU/CSU, too. The Green party is on a roll, boosted by an enormous surge of public concern over climate change and other environmental issues. But their meteoric rise is also the consequence of the weakness of those presently in power.

A forsa Trendbarometer poll published on June 1 saw the Greens at a staggering 27 percent of the vote, three times what the party got at the last federal election in 2017. The CDU/CSU would come a close second at 26 percent (minus 7 percent) and the SPD a distant third at 12 percent (minus 8.5 percent). “This is the latest culmination of a development that has been in the make for years: a loss of trust in the conservatives and in particular in the SPD, which is in danger of drifting into complete insignificance,” the head of the polling institute, Manfred Güllner, explained. (An Insa poll, published June 3, had the Greens at 25 percent, one point behind the CDU/CSU at 26 percent, with the SPD registering 14 percent.)

SPD in Disarray

For sure, the SPD—a party with a proud tradition reaching back more than 150 years—is in full disarray. Under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the last SPD politician to hold that office, it lost much of its soul when it grudgingly endorsed Schröder’s labor market and social benefits reforms. Since then, the SPD has been worn down as junior partner in three of Merkel’s four coalition governments.

When Nahles, 48, took over the chair of the SPD in September 2017, she was hailed as the last hope of a party that was sinking ever faster. It was also replacing its leaders at alarming speed (often enough with Nahles’ help—she was instrumental in getting rid of Franz Müntefering in 2009 and of Sigmar Gabriel in 2017).

Nahles has a brilliant analytical mind and huge experience both within the party and in government, yet her sharp rhetoric was often jarring even to SPD supporters. So when the European elections on May 26 went so terribly wrong for the SPD, Nahles got all the blame. Exhausted by the mobbing, she resigned as party and Bundestag group leader and announced her retirement from politics. “Thank you and take care,” she told journalists when leaving the SPD headquarters for the last time.

An interim party leadership consisting of three regional SPD politicians is now charged with mapping the way forward. This will include a discussion at the end of June over whether to continue the “grand coalition”, or GroKo (“Grosse Koalition”) under Merkel, that much of the SPD grass roots hate anyway.

Keeping Up Appearances

Merkel played it cool, at least initially. She did not believe that a change of leadership in the SPD was a signal of instability, the chancellor declared publicly. The SPD’s personnel decisions, she added, should not keep the government from doing its work. Yet even Merkel must have known how false those words sounded, given the sorry mess that her own party, the Christian Democrats, is in, too.

Back in December 2018, Merkel stepped down as CDU party leader, making way for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. But AKK’s (as she is known) honeymoon was short. Merkel, enjoying rising personal popularity scores, showed absolutely no willingness to cede the chancellery to Kramp-Karrenbauer early. Nor did she exert herself in the European election campaign. Meanwhile, AKK made her own mistakes, trying to please the different groups within her party and mishandling social media.

Ironically, it’s the SPD’s tragedy that for now is stabilizing the CDU. The party’s establishment is keenly aware of how many mandates its stands to lose—and how easy it is to be drawn into the same kind of downward spiral that the SPD is experiencing. Not only the forsa poll suggests that voters who Merkel was able to attract by being more liberal than her party are now switching their support to the Greens.

But even if the CDU has every interest to avoid early elections, the coalition is not likely to outlast this year. “I believe it will last until the fall. But until Christmas—nobody can say,“ said Armin Laschet, the powerful state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and one of the leading CDU contenders for Merkel’s succession.

Moment of Truth

The moment of truth is likely to come with regional elections scheduled in three eastern German states this fall. Here, disappointment with the governing parties has not benefitted the Greens as much as in the west; instead, the clear winner is the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

To make matters worse, the east German AfD groupings tend to be particularly radical, revisionist, and xenophobic, which will push the entire party even further to the right. Every vote for the AfD will weaken Merkel, whom the AfD depicts as Germany’s worst public enemy because of her policy on refugees in 2015/16.

In the elections in Saxony on September 1, the AfD is expected to come close to the ruling CDU; on the same day, the SPD will probably lose Brandenburg, one of its few remaining regional strongholds. The elections in Thuringia will follow six weeks later, but by then, the damage for Merkel’s coalition will probably have been done. The SPD, giving in to grass roots pressure, will probably pull out.

“No, they won’t stay,” said Wolfgang Merkel (no relation), a Berlin political scientist and long-time SPD associate. “At that stage it will be rational to say that we cannot stop the downswing while in government. We will have to try to find a new drive in an opposition role.”

The Greens Are Coming

Merkel could try to carry on, either in a new coalition with the Greens and the liberal FDP, or as head of a minority government. Neither is likely given the fact that the Greens will do everything to push for early elections to cash in on their extraordinary surge.

The result would likely be a historic first for Germany: a coalition between the conservatives and the Greens at the federal level (if the conservatives come in first), or the first Green chancellor ever (if the Greens win the pole position).

Robert Habeck, the party’s charismatic and charming poster boy, would be the obvious choice, but Annalena Baerbock, his co-leader at the head of the party, is credited with a cooler intellect and better people skills. So far, the Greens themselves have carefully avoided discussing who would be their candidate for the chancellery.

”Stop that chancellor nonsense,” Habeck keeps saying. It’s a sound strategy—don’t jinx it, and avoid raising hackles for as long as possible. However, given the quickly worsening state of Merkel’s coalition, the Greens may soon have to address that issue.

The post Watch Out for a Green Chancellor appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© Reuters / Fabrizio Bensch

The European elections were a success for the Greens, particularly in Germany, where voters perceived climate as the most important issue. But the elections also saw, in Italy and Poland, gains for parties that oppose rapid climate action. How did Fridays for Future (FFF) react to the results? We see, especially in Germany, that the European elections were indeed climate elections, which we were working toward. And we saw that voters made sure that parties not only see the urgency on the street but feel it through the results. That’s absolutely essential, a crucial step in the emergence of a movement. While, of course across, Europe we see Green parties emerging in various countries, right-wing populists and climate deniers also gained momentum, which is worrying in a lot of ways.

The German Greens seem to be on track to be part of the next government. Do you trust them to do enough to work against catastrophic climate change? Well, we’ll see. On the European level, the Greens have a solid track record of voting for the climate. This could be improved in many senses, but it is, in some respects at least, outstanding compared to other parties. The Greens are now under enormous pressure, and they’re well aware of that. And they will have to show that they’re able to actually act upon those expectations. We will make sure the pressure remains high.

On the other hand, the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which denies climate change, was the strongest force in Saxony and in Brandenburg. Why is climate change perceived differently in those eastern German states, and is FFF weaker in that region? Yes. The eastern part of Germany is still lacking infrastructure and suffering from an enormous outflux of people. We are much weaker in that area, as most civil organizations are. In particular in those regions where there are very few people, there is a strong coal industry. So people are really living off coal and hence often oppose what we are asking for. I also see that other issues dominate the discourse, and while there’s less talk about environment and climate issues, there’s much more conversation going on about refugees and migration, for instance.

You recently tweeted that politicians can win over young voters not by wearing hoodies, but with good policies. Is the communication from the ruling coalition sometimes patronizing? Absolutely, in every sense.

Because they tell you things like you should strike on weekends? Well, they tell us that we young people surely have a right to demand climate justice, but perceive us as young people who are, you know, not patient enough in their understanding. While they are really the ones who are not understanding what’s going on with the planet, and that it’s their job to act. Which again brings us back to the power of these elections, where those politicians who have been patting us on the shoulder for months, saying, “You should go back to school and we will take care of this; we’ve heard you” are now really feeling the anger of not just young people but of a society that demands climate action.

This brings to mind the interview you and Economy Minister Peter Altmaier gave DER SPIEGEL. Two well-informed people had completely different readings of Germany’s climate progress, almost as if they were reading different statistics. How do you explain those different interpretations? Well, Germany has from the outside been considered a Klimavorreiter [climate trailblazer] in international terms. With the kickstart of the Energiewende [energy transition], that was in some cases justified. But it has been shifting drastically throughout the past years. From being a former Klimavorreiter, we have moved to become a climate laggard. We are now blocking on a European level; we are missing our own climate targets; and we are really a good example of a rich country that lacks the political will to take up its responsibility.

At the recent Petersberg Climate Dialogue, German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed support for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Yet Germany will miss the 2020 climate targets it set for itself in 2007, and she has been chancellor the entire time. What is Merkel’s climate legacy? That’s a very good question. She now has the chance to hugely change her legacy, or to hugely push it toward a brighter outcome. But right now, Merkel’s climate legacy will mostly be the kickstart of the Energiewende, and then the, well, the missed opportunities to introduce a socially sustainable coal exit, to rise up to Germany’s international and global responsibilities, to actually take up a lead role in climate politics worldwide—which we could have taken, and is now mostly empty, apart from [French President Emmanuel] Macron making a few declarations, such as the EU net-zero proposal for 2050. And we are about to crash the Paris agreement. If countries like Germany don’t start acting, we can throw Paris out the window.

So the Klimakabinett is meeting today, and Environment Minister Svenja Schulze is pushing ahead with her climate bill, which would make Germany’s national climate goals legally binding, and make ministries responsible for cutting emissions in their sectors of the economy. Will this bill get Germany’s climate policy on track? It would have to be a wonder bill with superpowers to get us back on track, but you know, who knows! The debate is definitely changing, and we see a much more active civil society and a political arena engaging in the climate debate. Climate has risen to become a priority topic for political dialogue. What is crucial: the bill discussed today is likely to be way too weak to actually change the game. Ministers are complaining about having to reduce emissions in their respective sectors, and the environmental minister is backing off in many cases. We will see what the outcome will be, but it’s going to be tough. We hear they’ve now stopped discussing a CO2 tax, which is considered one of the most effective mechanisms to reduce emissions, and they are looking more into CCS technologies. We know that those can be a part of the game, but they are a nice-to-have gadget and not at all as necessary as a quick coal-phaseout or a carbon tax.

One of the FFF demands for 2019 is to abolish fossil fuel subsidies in Germany. The production of fossil fuels alone receives €2.2 billion in subsidies a year. Shouldn’t cutting these be low-hanging fruit, to take German energy company RWE or other polluters “off welfare,” so to speak? Absolutely. Just like, you know, telling them to shut down one of the dirtiest coal mines, which is not even making any profits anymore. But RWE is ruling parts of the country—at least it feels like that—and with politicians kind of working together with RWE, rather than creating the laws to restrict them where necessary, we are never going to get anywhere.

The FFF program also says your demands should be realized in a “socially acceptable manner and under no circumstances only at the expense of people with low incomes.” So what’s the best way to do that in Germany, e.g. for the coal miners who have to eventually lose their jobs in any realistic pathway to 2 degrees warming? Is it a carbon tax like in Switzerland, where the dividends are in part redistributed to citizens? There are millions of different mechanisms and I think it’s up to policy experts to look through them and find out what’s the most effective and sustainable way to move forward. We as FFF see ourselves as being in a position to ask the government to act and refer to scientists and experts to find the best way to go ahead. Saying that you can’t protect the climate because of jobs just means that you haven’t understood what this is about. We have to save and protect the climate—bottom line, that’s it. Jobs, incomes, costs, technologies, these are all to-dos on our list. This is how it works, and this is what we have to get going with.

The interview was conducted by Noah Gordon.

The FFF movement, in cooperation with activists from 15 countries, is organizing a strike in Aachen, Germany, on June 21, to protest what they consider the biggest CO2 source in Europe, the Tagebau Garzweiler mine. It has also called for a worldwide strike on September 20.

A profile of Luisa Neubauer can be found here.

The post “The Greens Are Now Under Enormous Pressure” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Robert Habeck would hate this article. Or at least he would say he does. The high-flying head of the German Green party, aware that nothing kills a politician’s career quicker than hype, often appears to be deflecting his popularity. But in these past few months, no other political figure has caught the attention of Germany’s media more effectively than the smooth and casual 49-year-old intellectual from the Danish borderlands.

Habeck’s slightly grumpy charisma is infectious. The weekly carousel of German political talkshows (Anne Will, Maybrit Illner, Maischberger and hart aber fair) can’t get enough of his unshaven, tousle-haired charm: a count by the newspaper network RND found that in 2018, Habeck made the most appearances on the four TV staples of any German politician: 13 in all.

As if all that publicity weren’t enough, just last month he was anointed “politician of the year,” along with Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock, by Politik & Kommunikation, a media trade magazine that felt the need to celebrate the pair after the Green party’s spectacular autumn. In October’s state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the left-liberal environmentalists carved large slices out of the two major political parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the tailspinning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and made themselves the second-biggest force in both state parliaments.

Don’t Call Us a Volkspartei

Politik & Kommunikation’s laudatory editors said that, under Habeck and Baerbock, the Greens were “on the way to becoming a Volkspartei.” But that word, meant to invoke an exalted status, might have set Habeck’s teeth on edge. Literally “people’s party,” a Volkspartei is what Germans like to call the CDU and the SPD, the pragmatic centrists that encompass swathes of sensible citizens from many social strata. For decades, the two parties could put as much as 80 percent of the electorate under their umbrellas, steering Germany across a serene ocean of Realpolitik.

But things have changed. The political landscape is flattening out as people disperse to different camps. Established broad churches aren’t providing the succour they once did, and apart from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), no one appears to have benefited from this fragmentation more than the Greens. This is not to say that German voters have become deranged idealists chasing populist visions, but it does mean that Merkel’s political bloc no longer has a monopoly on conservatism. That became most clear in the aftermath of the Bavarian election, when surveys found that, as well as the 200,000 votes the Greens had stolen from the Social Democrats, the Greens had poached some 170,000 from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

This is significant: tens of thousands of people who had previously identified with an overwhelmingly Catholic conservative party with a hardline anti-immigration stance shifted to a former protest party with an ecological, migration-friendly agenda. The CSU’s election campaign, much like its governing policy in Bavaria for the past three years, was a desperate attempt to head off the threat from the AfD by relentlessly attacking Merkel for letting in too many refugees. That allowed the Greens to appear reasonable, to insist on the rule of law, and allowed the conservative Bavarian voter to find a serious alternative without having to associate with the stuffy leftism of the Social Democrats and (God forbid) Die Linke.

This isn’t all Habeck’s doing, obviously, but he is alert enough to believe that this is why, even though the Greens have now overtaken the SPD in the polls, a Volkspartei is exactly what he doesn’t want them to become—or be seen as becoming. In a society divided and (very slowly) bringing its diversity into its politics, the idea that a substantial part of the population will identify with any major political party is emphatically dead. The basic math supports the point: the Christian Democrats are only just clearing the 30-percent mark, and the Social Democrats can barely muster 15 percent of voters (as late-January polls show)—in other words, the political center can no longer count on the majority of the population.

When explaining this, Habeck occasionally coughs up a soundbite that flirts with meaninglessness, (“We don’t need the lowest common denominator, we need higher common goals,” he told one public broadcaster), but it speaks of optimism and strategic acumen that he sees this growing instability as an opportunity. “Volatility also means there’s a fair chance of winning majorities,” he told Der Spiegel magazine in December. “The loss of old certainties is at the same time the winning of new possibilities.”

Only Squares Join a Party

Habeck also appears to be alive to another aspect of this fragmentation. The whole idea of a political party, with its formalities, hierarchies, and laboriously set-out agendas is starting to weary voters, and German politicians are beginning to do what might be called the Emmanuel Macron En Marche thing: play the anti-elitist outsider and start a political movement from scratch. The most obvious parallel in Germany is the socialist Aufstehen organization, started by Sahra Wagenknecht, who has somehow managed to remain Die Linke’s party leader.

Habeck has ruled out going that far, but his interactions with the Green party suggest that he is carefully nurturing an aura of independence. He’s quite open about technological advances in agriculture, for instance, even if that defies traditional party wisdom.

This much is reflected in his precipitous rise: the son of pharmacists, Habeck grew up in Heikendorf, outside the port city of Kiel. Apart from marrying and raising children, he spent the 1990s producing literary translations, partly in Denmark, and writing a doctorate on literary aesthetics. But by the time he reached his 30s, he switched track. In 2002, he joined the Green party, and by 2004 he was its leader in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein. Even as he ascended the ranks—by 2012 he was the state’s minister for agriculture and environment—he continued as an author, publishing novels together with his wife Andrea Paluch and non-fiction that largely reflected his undergraduate passion for philosophy.

His most recent book, Wer wir sein könnten (“Who we could be”) from October 2018, examines the relations between democratic and totalitarian language, but his 2010 work Patriotismus: Ein linkes Plädoyer (“Patriotism—a left-wing appeal”) might be a better clue to understanding Habeck. It reads as an earnest and pragmatic attempt to reconcile the looming political splits that occurred in the second half of this decade. Still, a vestige of this approach is noticeable in the tour of Germany Habeck undertook last summer, during which, between political engagements, he visited spots that marked milestones in Germany’s path to democracy, such as the Hambacher Schloss, opening debates on how to “own” a left-liberal patriotic mythology.

A Serious Faux-Pas

Such noises have inevitably stirred unrest among the Green party’s ranks, though Habeck and Baerbock’s successes mean they have walked that awkward tightrope well: keeping the core voters on their side while reaching out beyond. For one reason or another, the Greens appear to be the only German party that is not either desperately searching for a new direction or in open conflict with itself. In fact, Habeck’s air of independence, and his close cooperation with Baerbock, have managed to quell the endless conflict between the party’s conservative “realos” and its left-wing “idealos”. For what it’s worth, Habeck is definitely a “realo”: he brought the Green party into coalition with the CDU and the neo-liberal Free Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, but he’s still in favor of a basic income, or at least ending sanctions on Hartz IV unemployment benefits.

But the bigger test to that inner harmony will come this autumn, when three elections in Germany’s least Green-friendly regions loom: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. The omens so far are not good: Thuringia was the scene of Habeck’s biggest mistake to date in early January, which resulted in his rather drastic renunciation of social media. In a video tweeted by the state’s Green party, Habeck told voters that his party “would do everything to make sure Thuringia becomes an open, free, liberal, and democratic state.”

It was an impromptu video message delivered in a noisy conference room, but that “becomes” was a significant faux pas: a grave insult to Thuringians, made worse by the fact that the Greens already are in the state’s government. Habeck’s statement also played to the prejudice that many Germans have about the Greens: that they are urban smart-asses who want to tell you what to do. For a second, Habeck’s composure, and his ability to speak to non-Green party voters, had slipped. It might yet prove a fateful signal.

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© REUTERS/Andreas Gebert

Germany’s Die Grünen, now polling around 20 percent as the second-strongest party after Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and surging in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, refer to themselves as the “alternative to the Alternative” in a poke to the German anti-immigration, far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland. Indeed, the pro-Europe, pro-environment, pro-immigration party offers strikingly different answers to the issues mostly dominated by the far-right rhetoric recently.

Their sister parties in Belgium and in the Netherlands have also done well at the polls. In the 2017 general Dutch elections, while all eyes were on far-right Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, the GroenLinks clinched the highest number of seats in parliament in their history. With their roots in environmental protest movements, Green parties can claim to be outsiders rather than mainstream.

The Greens have been picking up voters who feel betrayed by socialists or social democrats, and are uncomfortable with the far-right’s fear-mongering. They have been less successful in persuading liberal or center-right voters in significant numbers, except in Germany. Nevertheless, they seem to be well-equipped for a political arena that is no longer only divided by left and right, but is also dissected along fault lines between open and closed societies, pro-European and nationalist, urban and rural.

Isolated Successes

But despite the enthusiasm around the Green momentum this fall, it’s not likely to translate into a substantially bigger portion of the seats in the European Parliament at next spring’s election, or a bigger say in EU affairs. The Greens are not expected to dramatically increase their numbers, currently at 52 MEPs, although top mainstream parties, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), and the center-left Party of European Socialists (PES), are both likely to lose dozens of seats.

Yet the Green group’s co-chair in the European Parliament Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts sounds optimistic that Greens can deliver the recipe against populists in an age of anxiety about climate change and migration, coupled with the fear of being left behind by globalization.

“I have a good feeling about this election. The situation is worrying, populism is on the rise, but their victory is not a given. They have won in Italy, but have performed worse than expected in Sweden and the Netherlands,” he said recently.

While French president Emmanuel Macron is pitching himself against champions of illiberal democracy in Europe, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Italy’s Matteo Salvini, expectations that he could transform European politics have dipped sharply. Macron has been mired in a political crisis at home, facing protestors whose cause the Greens are aiming to embrace.

“Macron is right that this election will pit national-populists against ‘progressives.’ But he is mistaken as far as the subject of the confrontation is concerned. This is about who offers the most credible and desirable alternative to mainstream policies, which Macron himself embodies—policies that make the EU the vehicle of adaptation for our countries to the neo-liberal version of globalization,” Lamberts quipped.

 Addressing Common Concerns

Greens are arguing for a need to address the concerns of voters who fled to the far-right. They point to deprived rural areas, where people feel abandoned as public services withdrew due to spending cuts. They point to the middle classes who are struggling to make ends meet, and some in the party argue that a socially blind green party has no future.

“We have put human dignity rather than the obsessive pursuit of short-term profit maximization at the center. Today, human beings and the planet are made to serve the economy, which in turn is made to serve finance. We have to reverse this and put finance at the service of the economy and the economy at the service of a dignified life for all human beings,” Lamberts added.

That means rethinking some of the underlying policies of the European project, such as pursuing economic growth above anything else. “What is good for Volkswagen is not automatically good for Germany. We have to do away with this thinking,” the Belgian politician said.

Greens emphasize that this approach could quell anxieties about migration as well, arguing that in the October elections Greens gained votes not despite, but because of migration.

“Either you run exclusion policies inside and outside, or you promote solidarity outside and inside,” Lamberts said, adding: “People want to hear a realistic solution on migration, that combines humanism and realism.”

“Not a Luxury Thing”

Lamberts’ emphasis on the social aspects has a practical side. Greens have to battle the perception that they represent well-off urbanites who can afford to worry about whales and forests.

“Green issues are not a luxury thing,” the German co-chair of the Green group in the EU parliament, Ska Keller said. She is one of the party’s lead candidates in the European election. “Climate change is very much a social issue,” she added, pointing out that rich people can move away from bad air quality or buy better quality food products.

But while it seems that uncertain voters in Germany and the Nordic countries hear that message, it has been far less successful in eastern and southern Europe.

Doru Frantescu, director of VoteWatch Europe, a think-tank in Brussels, said it is unlikely there would be a green wave next May. Victories are isolated and do not represent a continent-wide trend, he added. However, if the German Greens maintained their position as second biggest party at home, the party could come 5th overall in the EU parliament next year.

“But that’s the exception, not the rule,” Frantescu said. “Greens are quasi non-existent in Spain, Poland, and Italy.” According to VoteWatch Europe’s projections, the Greens will more or less maintain their numbers in the European Parliament, he added.

Few and Far Between

Currently, the Greens have two Hungarian MEPs who hail from different national parties, and a few from the Balkans and the Baltics. In general, however, Greens are seen as too radical and too left-wing in much of central and eastern Europe to attract sizeable support. While environmentalists played an important role in standing up for human rights and the rule of law, they face considerable obstacles in actually becoming viable political forces in countries that tend to be culturally more conservative, Frantescu said.

Keller, however, insists the tide is turning. “It’s not just a northern, western thing. In the south and the east of Europe we are doing well, too” the German MEP said, pointing out that a Green party managed to put forward candidates in each district in local elections in Poland recently. Green topics have also come to the forefront in Bulgaria, she added.

Indrek Tarand, an independent Estonian politician who sits with the Greens in the European Parliament said he hoped that voters would pick “a humanist trajectory for Europe, instead of those who want to take us back to the Middle Ages,” he said, referring to populist and extremist forces.

He also pointed out that Die Grünen in Germany were founded almost 40 years ago. “Perhaps we need more time,” he said.

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© REUTERS/Andreas Gebert

“Zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds,” a big LED countdown read, leaning against the stage where Bavarian Green party members celebrated. The first prognosis for the state election results had just flickered across TV screens. And there was much to shout about. The Greens had succeeded in what they had promised to do during a year-long campaign: To end the absolute majority of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union. In the end, Sunday’s election result saw the CSU support dropping dramatically to 37.2 percent, while the Greens won a record result of 17.5 percent, effectively doubling their seats in the state parliament.

This success story was splashed across headlines, running counter to the narrative that dominated the news before the election: how the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had eroded the foundation of the conservative stronghold and pushed the Bavarian ruling party to the right. The CSU had tried and failed to dabble with populist sentiment when party leader and Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer brought the government coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD) to the brink of collapse this summer by pushing for harder migrant policies.

In the end, neither the far-right nor the CSU succeeded with their focus on anti-migrant sentiment; with 10.2 percent, the AfD scored less than they did in federal elections in September 2017, leading some to interpret the Greens’ success in Bavaria as proof that the populist wave gripping European politics is over.

However, there is more to the Greens’ strong showing. A first analysis of voter migration suggests the CSU hadn’t lost as many party loyalists to the Greens as expected. Instead, it may have underestimated those who were always more skeptical of the traditional peoples’ party or Volksparteien, as parties like the CDU/CSU and SPD in Germany are called.

The Fading Charm of Brez’n, Beer, and Brass

Almost half of Bavaria’s 9.5 million-strong electorate was undecided before election day. On the final days of the campaign, the conservative state premier Markus Söder was confident to win over many of those votes for his CSU. Undecided voters traditionally turn out for the Conservatives, the established political force in Bavarian public life, having dominated Bavarian politics for six decades. But this time banking on the charm of pretzels (“Brez’n”), beer, and brass didn’t work, even though turnout increased by almost 10 to 72.4 percent.

The Greens, for their part, still decorate their platforms with large pots of sunflowers, but the party has come a long way from its image as a club for tree-huggers. Surveys by Bavarian public broadcaster Bayrischer Rundfunk showed that the Greens had managed to establish themselves as a party that voters saw competent on more topics than their core brand of ecology and sustainability. By offering solutions to issues from digital infrastructure to affordable housing and child care, they mirrored the variety of voter concerns rather than engaging with the anti-migration narratives of their opponents. And reflecting the plethora of daily life issues may have ultimately been a key factor of their success.

Another is their new emphasis on a more Realpolitik-driven approach, also on the federal level. This spring the Greens kicked off a two-year process to rewrite their national party manifesto and to modernize and rethink their policies. How deep-rooted this multifarious approach has become within the party could be measured by the high-profile supporters of Ludwig Hartmann and Katharina Schulze, the leaders of the Bavarian campaign. On Sunday they were joined by on of the national leaders, Robert Habeck, as well as the Bundestag’s Green caucus leader, Anton Hofreiter, the left-leaning first-generation party member Claudia Roth, as well as the party the pragmatic MP Cem Özdemir from Baden-Württemberg, where the Greens are actually leading the state government, with Angela Merkel’s CDU as the junior partner.

The Greens’ strong result brings new complexities, however. Entering the Bavarian parliament as the second largest party, with 38 out of 205 seats, they are venturing into new territory, and the question now turns to how to use this new strength: it will not get them into government, as the CSU will likely enter a coalition with the Freie Wähler party. Therefore, the Greens have to establish themselves as a broad opposition force to be reckoned with, a role the party hasn’t played in the past. The real challenge for the Greens, it seems, isn’t getting where they wanted to be, but how to move forward.

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