Everyone loves Germany’s Greens (for now)

BERLIN — Germany’s Greens are riding high, but are they for real? 

Just a week after choosing their candidate for chancellor — party co-leader Annalena Baerbock — the Greens’ poll numbers are on fire. In some surveys, the party has even supplanted the Christian Democrats, the center-right bloc that has governed Germany under Angela Merkel for the past 16 years. 

If the Greens can sustain that momentum until election day in September, they will likely lead the next government — a political earthquake that would reverberate across the Continent.  

Yet all honeymoons end, sometimes in tears. Why, many ask, should Germans’ infatuation with the Greens be any different? The stock Green response is that their success isn’t a fluke. 

“Our strength isn’t ephemeral, we’ve built it over months and years,” said Franziska Brantner, a senior Green MP and Baerbock confidante who focuses on European affairs. 

While that may sound like a hollow boast, it isn’t.

A reminder of just how successful the Greens’ long game has been came Thursday when Germany’s highest court threw out the government’s 2019 environmental law for not being ambitious enough. The case was brought by a coalition of environmental groups endorsed by the Greens. 

The court’s sweeping ruling — which will effectively force the government to rewrite its environmental code — would be considered an audacious attempt to legislate from the bench in many countries; in Germany, the decision was cheered, even by members of government responsible for the original law. 

The ruling was not just “epoch-making,” but “great and significant,” tweeted Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, a Merkel ally. Altmaier then tussled with Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, over which government coalition partner was to blame for the shoddy legislation that the court declared “unconstitutional.”    

The decision illustrates just how mainstream Green ideas have become and why the party that has warned against the perils of climate change for decades has become such a political force. 

And yet, while there’s no question that the Greens have captured the zeitgeist with their core mission, a number of their other priorities remain well outside the political mainstream. 

For any German who has supported Merkel’s centrist course, the Greens’ new “Manifesto of Principles,” passed at a convention in November, will make for interesting reading. In other parties, such documents are often dismissed as little more than a catalog of empty promises. But the Green base is different — it expects party leaders to deliver. 

The manifesto calls, among other things, for “a Germany free of nuclear weapons and thus a swift end to nuclear participation.” Translation: the U.S. needs to get its nukes out of Germany. 

Though Baerbock subsequently made clear she doesn’t expect that to happen overnight, the goal itself is controversial because it would require removing the foundation of the security umbrella that has protected Germany for decades. The 120-page manifesto makes no mention of the United States, the country generally seen as the guarantor of German defense, but it does mention NATO, which it describes as in “deep crisis.”   

The solution to NATO’s problems is not, in the Greens’ view, for Germany to meet its obligations to the alliance by fulfilling a pledge that all members have made to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. Instead, they favor a “European” solution. 

“We’re not in favor of national goals when it comes to European defense,” Brantner said. “It’s an inherent contradiction to say we want a European security policy and then for everyone to do something on a national basis. That makes no sense.”

Instead, Brantner said Germany should follow France’s lead in pursuing President Emmanuel Macron’s vision for “European sovereignty.”

“NATO is not the priority,” she added. 

Defense policy isn’t the only issue on which the Greens are going against the grain. 

On the politically dicey issue of migration, the party doesn’t just want to end the tough asylum policies implemented by Germany’s current government; it wants rich countries like Germany that have contributed to climate change to compensate poorer countries that are suffering the effects of it, including by easing outward migration. 

“States that historically and currently emit the majority of climate-damaging gases must participate in a global compensation of climate impacts, damages and losses as well as in the creation of safe and dignified migration routes,” the party program says. 

As for the EU’s refugee deal with Turkey (under which Ankara agreed to taken in millions of refugees in return for billions of euros), the Greens aren’t fans.  

“The possibility of fleeing and seeking protection in Germany and Europe must not be made more difficult through cooperation with third countries, and cooperation must not lead to human rights violations,” the manifesto states.  

The Greens’ migration policies may be noble in spirit, but it’s far from clear whether they are politically viable in a country where recent battles over migration have redrawn the political landscape, spawning one of the Continent’s most virulent far-right parties. 

So far, tough questions about how the Greens plan to put their ambitious program into action have been largely missing from the public debate.  

That’s mainly because the German press has been too busy praising them. 

In the days after the Greens gave Baerbock the nod for the chancellor run, she was seemingly everywhere, on magazine covers, on talkshows and the nightly news. 

While that was to be expected, the gauzy tone of the coverage wasn’t. 

“Finally something different,” Der Stern declared in green letters under a cover photo of Baerbock in a black leather jacket. “One feels here excitement,” the weekly told readers. The generally more critical Der Spiegel pictured Baerbock, hands on her hips, under the headline “The woman for all contingencies.”  

The apex of Baerbock-mania came during her first television interview after her nomination. At the end of the live discussion, the two journalists who peppered her with softball questions for 45 minutes were so excited that they did something one usually only sees on talent shows: They broke into applause. 

Some of the enthusiasm for the Greens might be driven by exasperation with the center right over its shambolic process to elect a candidate for the chancellor race. That would explain the Greens’ sudden surge in the polls. 

Whatever the cause, the German media’s love affair with the Greens is bound to wane as the campaign progresses. Political popularity inevitably triggers scrutiny. 

When it arrives, Baerbock will have to prove her substance runs deeper than a glossy magazine cover.  

Nette Nöstlinger contributed reporting.