Leaders of Germany’s Greens to step down following election defeats

The leaders of Germany’s Greens, one of three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s troubled coalition government, announced on Wednesday that they will step down after the latest in a string of disappointing election results.

The Greens’ support declined sharply in the European Parliament election in June. Voters ejected them from two state parliaments in eastern Germany in regional elections this month, most recently in Brandenburg on Sunday.

Co-leader Omid Nouripour said in a statement to reporters on Wednesday that the result in Brandenburg “is evidence of our party’s deepest crisis for a decade”.

Mr Nouripour and the party’s other co-leader, Ricarda Lang, took the helm of the party in early 2022 after their predecessors, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, joined Mr Scholz’s government as vice chancellor and foreign minister respectively.

The party has seen its popularity decline since.

The national government — an uneasy combination of Mr Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats with the Greens, who also lean to the left, and the pro-business Free Democrats — has angered Germans by bickering at length over poorly explained projects that sometimes raise fears of new costs.

Those included a plan drawn up by Mr Habeck’s economy and climate ministry to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with greener alternatives.

The plan is for new leaders to be elected at a previously scheduled party congress in mid-November, Mr Nouripour said.

“New faces are needed to lead this party out of this crisis,” Ms Lang said. “You can imagine that this decision isn’t easy, but we are taking it out of conviction.”

Neither Mr Nouripour nor Ms Lang are part of Mr Scholz’s Cabinet. Their decision does not affect the Greens’ ministers.

In the European Parliament election, the Greens slumped to 11.9% of the vote from an exceptionally successful 20.5% five years earlier, losing ground among young voters in particular. In Germany’s last national election in 2021, when Ms Baerbock made the party’s first run for the chancellery, the party won 14.8%.

Ms Baerbock said in July that she would not make another bid for Germany’s top job in the next election, scheduled for September 2025. The party has not yet decided whether it will put up a candidate for chancellor again, though Mr Habeck is widely believed to be keen to run.

Mr Habeck told German news agency dpa that the leaders’ resignation is “a great service to the party” and “they are clearing the way for a strong new beginning”.