When Gerhard Schroeder formed a German government with the Greens in 1998, he made it clear that his Social Democratic Party was the “cook” and the junior partner the “waiter.” Well, not any more. Polls show the Greens with all the momentum going into September’s election and the odds-on favorites for a return to coalition government. What’s more, they’re on the up just as the other main parties fade, giving Annalena Baerbock a realistic shot at capturing the chancellery for the Greens for the first time in history.
“I stand for renewal,” Baerbock, 40, said in Berlin on Monday as her candidacy was announced. “Others represent the status quo.”
If Germany is on the verge of delivering such a shock, it’s come about through a combination of circumstances. The first is that Angela Merkel is standing down—16 years after beating Schroeder—and, for someone who became the epitome of stability, she leaves in her wake a sea of electoral unpredictability.
The truth is that after so long calling the shots, her Christian Democratic Union, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, has an air of exhaustion. So does its Social Democratic partner, with whom Merkel will have governed for 12 of those 16 years. Polls show Merkel’s conservative bloc of the CDU and its CSU Bavarian sister party floundering under her would-be successor, Armin Laschet, with the Social Democrats a distant third.
It’s the end of a period when “ultimately the tried and tested methods were no longer sufficient to cope with the new challenges,” said Jana Puglierin, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The Greens, with their youthful image and impeccable environmental credentials that capture the Zeitgeist of climate summits and Fridays for Future demonstrations, are the clear beneficiaries. Their rise to become contenders represents an extraordinary journey from protest movement to mainstream respectability over the course of two generations.
Long Road
Germany’s Greens have labored in the main parties’ shadows for decades
Source: German Bundestag, Wahlrecht.de
* 2021 figures based on an average of the latest polls as of April 22
Until now, the Greens’ biggest achievement was serving as junior partner in the Schroeder government’s two terms. That was after taking just 6.7% of the vote in 1998; now it’s polling at 21-23%, as little as one percentage point behind Laschet’s bloc. One shock poll this week even showed the Greens surging into the lead.
There is long campaign ahead, however, and whether Germany’s risk-averse voters actually embrace the party on Sept. 26 will depend on whether they look beyond the radicalism of its early years.
The Green movement grew out of the myriad protests of the day. Armed with the conviction “that natural resources are limited and of the need for an economic and societal rethink, we stood pretty much alone back then,” the party records on its website.
Not for long. In 1983, three years after the party was founded, 29 lawmakers entered the federal parliament, then in the West German capital of Bonn. Members including Petra Kelly and Joschka Fischer, a 1968-generation student militant who had fought with police on the streets, brought a provocative new political style that challenged the establishment.