German chancellor Olaf Scholz held a crisis meeting with his coalition partners on Wednesday as the resignation of the Green Party’s leadership increased speculation of a snap election.
The resignations came three days after the Greens – and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) – were ejected from the new Brandenburg state parliament in Potsdam after polling just 4 per cent and 0.83 per cent respectively.
After a run of bad state and EU election results, Green Party co-leader Omid Nouripour said Brandenburg had triggered “the deepest crisis of our party in a decade”.
The party is nearly six points down on its 2021 result, as voter attention drifts from its core climate change policies towards migration and the consequences of the war in Ukraine.
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Co-leader Ricarda Lang said a leadership reshuffle – due at the November party conference – could offer “building blocks” for a relaunched Green Party ahead of the next federal election, scheduled for September 2025.
That election, she said, would “decide how Germany develops in the future and just what this country wants to be”.
It was a nod to a surge in support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). At 20 per cent in federal polls, and above 30 per cent in three successive state elections, the AfD is riding a wave of frustration on irregular migration and related security concerns.
Earlier this month, Nouripour said that the “bar-room brawl” disputes were not helping the ruling coalition, which he called a “transition” administration.
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The Green resignations turn attention to the second junior coalition partner in Berlin: the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
Even by its long record of election trouncings, Sunday’s Brandenburg result marked a new low.
Final results showed the FDP attracted just 12,462 out of 1.5 million votes cast – just 12 more than in the pile of spoiled votes, and less than half the ballot for Germany’s Animal Welfare party.
With 3.5 per cent support in national polls, well below the 5 per cent hurdle to Bundestag representation, the FDP with its leader Christian Lindner – federal finance minister – is facing the political abyss.
Some in the party want to pull the plug early on Berlin’s traffic-light coalition, others fear this could compound their collapse as, traditionally, German voters take a dim view of parties that trigger early elections.
The FDP’S coalition allies suspect the party will try to get out anyway by picking a battle in one of their many points of disagreement: a wobbly federal budget, rising social spending and competing migration policies.
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After Wednesday’s chancellery gathering – ostensibly to discuss what to do with almost €10 billion Berlin set aside for a now-delayed Intel plant – a spokesman for Scholz insisted the Green resignations would have “no effect whatsoever on the coalition”.
But not everyone is sure if the chancellor has control over his coalition’s future. Many in Berlin blame the FDP’s woes on Lindner, accusing him of narrowing the focus of a once-broad liberal party to a neoliberal lobby group for well-heeled western Germans.
“Leaving the coalition would be suicide by instalments, but perhaps the FDP guys are so burned-out that they are no longer capable of constructive politics,” said Prof Klaus Schubert, political scientist at the University of Münster. “Politics is the art of compromise but that no longer works for the FDP, and they really have no options left.”
Hopes of a snap election hung in the air on Wednesday evening as the opposition centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) gathered to mark the 70th birthday of ex-leader Angela Merkel.
Thorsten Frei, CDU Bundestag floor leader, said: “This coalition is crumbling before the cameras.”
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