I found myself in a rather strange conversation this week. During a lull in a meeting, someone began a conversation on politics. Usually I would avoid these discussions at work, mainly because I have quite forthright opinions and rarely has sharing them with colleagues gone well. Sometimes it’s better just to listen than to ram home my personal views, after all, I have a blog for that. The group began discussing Annalena Baerbock, Die Grünen (The Green Party) candidate for Chancellor. My ears perked up at the mention of her name. Ever since her election, Baerbock has been the focus of forensic questioning from all sides, which is no surprise given that months of polling has suggested the Greens could be a sizeable part of the next governing coalition in the Bundestag. Despite strong polling numbers, the constant glare of the media spotlight has uncovered a series of mini scandals, first over a failure to declare earnings, then over some errors in a speech given in a Bundestag debate and more recently over the Masters Baerbock gained from the London School of Economics. As scandals go in Germany, these were hardly on the scale of apparent Corona profiteering or the government connections to the failure of the German financial services provider Wirecard. Regardless of scale, these stories have dented the image of Baerbock as the candidate of change in the upcoming elections.

As I listened to the discussion, it became apparent I wasn’t in the presence of the Green voter base. One of the participants mentioned a recent story in which Baerbock had declared that the German national team should do away with the national flag at German international football matches. I try to keep track of German politics, but I hadn’t heard this particular story. Something seemed off about it, after all, given the current levels of scrutiny of the Green Party and its leadership, this kind of story would surely have sparked heated discussions in the news or at least on social media. As the group talked, I starting searching google for an article on the topic. Every search attempt brought up a blank. Was this fake news? A final search gave me a hit, but instead of an article on comments made by Annalena Baerbock, what I found was a short interview with the spokesperson of the Jungen Grünen (young greens) the youth movement within the German Green Party.

How had an interview with Jungen Grünen morphed into a quote by the leader of the main party? I’ll probably never know, but it does track with much of the fevered media output concerning Baerbock. For weeks opponents of Die Grünen in the media as well as rival candidates have been increasingly aggressive in their criticism of the Greens and more directly on the suitability of Baerbock for the highest office in Germany. In fact, as the discussion was happening, the lobbying group Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft were running a major advertising campaign in a number of German newspapers showing Baerbock dressed as Moses, carrying a list of fabricated polices on two stone tablets, with the words ‘Wir Brauchen Keine Staatsreligion’ (We don’t need a state religion) in bold type. The message was clear: Annalena Baerbock is a zealot and the policies advocated by her party are tantamount to religious indoctrination. The attack ads had created a stir online and were already facing accusations of anti-Semitism from both the president of the Zentralrats der Juden In Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Charlotte Knobloch and the anti-Semitism commissioner Michael Blume. Moreover, the scale and aggressiveness of the adverts had caught many commentators off-guard. Full page ads in newspapers and large wrap around adverts on the websites of major newspapers distorting the position of a rival candidate feels like a strategy from the Boris Johnson playbook of political campaigning and is a possible signal of what to expect from the upcoming election campaign. 

Germany isn’t immune to dirty tactics in politics, but what’s more concerning for supporters of the Die Grünen is that it seems to be working. From the heady heights of only a few months ago, when they surged ahead of the perennial party of government, the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU), the Greens have gradually dropped in the polls. At the same time, the constant focus on Baerbock has seen her personal rating drop below that of her rivals Armin Laschet (CDU) and Olaf Scholz (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). It’s now uncertain whether the Greens will even be part of the next government. 

Talking with people this week it’s interesting to note how ready some are to dismiss the Green Party and its leader. The party’s policies on climate do demand sacrifices, at the same time the party hasn’t shied away from the fact that in order to fix the problems in tech infrastructure, education, and to rebuild after the pandemic will require an increase in the national debt. German voters, or at least the ones I speak to regularly, all recognise the problems Germany faces going into the next decade, but the majority are less and less inclined to make personal sacrifices in order to meet them or to risk the debt break that has been in place for many years. The warm and often vague promises of the other parties (CDU, SPD and FDP) appear to address these concerns. The fact that all three have been part of governing coalitions over the last fifteen years, presiding over a lengthy period of stagnation which now requires the remedy of large scale investment and a change to the debt break mechanism, doesn’t appear to matter. 

Reading the manifestos of the these major parties suggests why German voters may prefer to vote for more of the same rather than take a “risk” voting for the Greens. The CDU, FDP and SPD all seem wedded to maintaining the debt break that has contributed to a lack of investment in German infrastructure. They all promise to address the climate emergency, but only in such a way that no one will really need to sacrifice anything. I’m no expert on German politics, but in order to fix the issues we face in the next ten years it’s going to take more than just timid policies promoted with exciting language by vaguely similar men in vaguely similar suits all saying vaguely the same thing. The Greens are at least being honest with the electorate, which may well cost them the election. 

Image Credit

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash 

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash