January 31, 2025 - 10:00am
Ahead of the German elections on 23 February, much has been said and written about the rise of the German Right. Combined, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the conservative Union of the CDU and CSU are set to draw at least half of the vote, according to the polls. But their surge is in no small part due to a collapse of the Left, which continues to be plagued by internal rifts, a lack of ideas, and damaging scandals.
The Greens have arguably seen the most spectacular collapse in recent years. At the peak of their popularity in April 2021, they were riding high in the polls at 28%. Now, they would be lucky to manage half that. In September last year, they were kicked out of two state parliaments, and the leadership resigned over this defeat.
What should have been an opportunity for the Greens to reflect and rebuild has triggered more internal strife. The latest scandal to rock the party came in December in the form of allegations of sexual harassment against Stefan Gelbhaar, a Berlin member of parliament. But it has now been reported that the allegations were made up to force Gelbhaar to resign, with the German public broadcaster which covered the story now admitting that “journalistic standards weren’t completely adhered to.” The woman suspected to be behind the accusation is Shirin Kreße, co-chair of a Green chapter in central Berlin. She has now resigned from the party.
Gelbhaar continues to fight the allegations, but the damage to his career, his reputation, and the Green Party’s campaign is done. He lost his place on the party’s list of candidates, and Green chancellor candidate Robert Habeck denounced the “scandalous process” as being fuelled by “criminal energy”. The Green youth wing, already at odds with moderates like Gelbhaar, said it still had no sympathy for him, with its leader Jette Nietzard, arguing that “being in a feminist party means believing victims.”
The Greens have found themselves in the news more often for these kinds of stories than over hot-button issues such as immigration and economic recovery. This has also been true for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD, which is in a coalition with the Greens. Due to Scholz’s low favourability ratings, many in his party openly endorsed the much more popular Defence Minister Boris Pistorius for the chancellorship until the latter stepped back and endorsed the incumbent.
But leadership isn’t at the core of the SPD’s issues. What was once a working-class party has steadily lost its core voters. The AfD won the working-class vote in the European elections last year with 33% of the demographic, while only 12% of workers remained with the SPD. Unperturbed, Scholz dug his heels in, hosting an “election victory conference” that appeared totally detached from reality. Germany’s oldest party is currently set to receive its worst result in well over a century, polling at around 15%.
On the far-Left, division has even led to a party split. Die Linke, in part a successor of the former ruling party of East Germany, lost many of its most prominent MPs when the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht left the party to form her own. Her BSW party is now polling higher than Die Linke, but both will have to fight hard to make it into the German parliament.
Many German voters feel that their country faces enormous challenges such as a stagnant economy, high immigration and an increasing cost of living. The German Left appears too divided to offer a clear path to change, and will be punished accordingly at the ballot box. The SPD and the Greens might gain less than 30% of the vote share combined — the same as the conservative CDU/CSU on its own.
The challenge for the conservatives is not so much coming first in this divided field but instead picking one or two coalition partners from a depleted pool, having vowed not to form a coalition with the AfD. In the end, the chaos of the Left may well become a headache for the Right, too.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
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Subscribe“…the chaos of the Left may well become a headache for the Right too.”
Not all that much different from the UK. I propose the new political equation:
British chaos + PR = German chaos.
The ‘chaos’ comes about because the countries in Europe have ceased to be nations and instead are conglomerations of special interest groups. Politicians are running around in ever-decreasing circles, trying to appeal to or appease these interest groups. Better not to have a policy rather that risk upsetting somebody!
As I have said before, the Greens are failing because people (strangely) would rather have cheap power than be called Green. The pride of being Green in a non-Green population has morphed into the pride of being – female, gay, trans, non-white, over-fair to ethnic minorities, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the Greens have tried to absorb all of these minority issues, doing deals with other parties, twisting and turning to stay in the limelight, but forgetting about their roots. Remember that Greta is now very pro-Palestinian.
Any party with real proposals attracts the word ‘far’ as in Far Right or Far Left. Both extremes of the spectrum risk being called ‘Populist’.
The great mistake of the modern European (and British) left, whether red or green, has been to assume that they would be the principal beneficiaries of the ghettoisation that they’ve worked so hard to promote.
Instead, as the UK rape gangs scandal so perfectly illustrates, it has forced all of them into a kind of ideological prostitution that it will take generations to escape.
Hak-ar-Dalan, is that you? Very astutely observed and a good analysis. Chapeau. I am able to vote this time, and I’m very hard pressed. The manifestos are of such empty and meaningless drivel that they really don’t help. Might as well use something like ‘get brexit done’ for all the policies they have published.
You make the excellent point that Britain’s FPTP political system does provide a bit of a bulwark against the sort of idiocy that flows from coalition governments.
I have no sympathy for the Greens and their scandals: this is what happens when you’re in a mucky business like politics but make a habit of holding yourselves out as being natives of a higher moral plane. Reality will get you in the end.
The Green youth wing, already at odds with moderates like Gelbhaar, said it still had no sympathy for him, with its leader Jette Nietzard, arguing that “being in a feminist party means believing victims.”
This makes me think of how the current Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, entered office saying she was going to pursue “a feminist foreign policy”. Lord knows what that was supposed to mean – probably not being left out of the handshakes-round with the new Syrian leader at any rate.
The German Greens are just far too good at pumping out these silly slogans while only exhibiting a tenuous grip on reality and an even shakier attachment to the ability to get stuff done.
A proper green party would seek sustainability by a reduction in Getmany’s and the world’s population and respect the land and those who are intimately tied to it. Unfortunately they have become infested by social justice promoting vermin. I look forward to their annihilation.
Are you actually suggesting a party should run on a platform of depopulating the country?
Human over-population ultimately, is, or will be, the biggest problem we have to face, and find a solution to. If the ‘Greens’ are serious about environmental issues, it should be their first priority.
Yes, Auschwitz would be the ideal of a proper green party.
Thank you.
A slow-motion train wreck.
Fresh from the complete destruction of the German energy sector by the Greens, I cannot understand why ANYONE votes for these morons.
I’d recommend the Eugyppius substack for English-language political news about Germany from a conservative perspective.
I can’t speak about Germany specifically, but it seems the exploits of their Greens are not that different to those of Greens worldwide.
Great. They were an utter catastrophe.
The Left in Germany, and pretty much everywhere else across the West has abandoned the working class in favour of identity politics, Net Zero cultism and fashionable minorities. The fact that they no longer win elections should create pause for sustained reflection and recalibration on the Left. The fact that no such rethink has emerged is testament to the fact that the Left deserves not to be in power. The Greens are headed to the same place where the once mighty French and Italian Communist Parties ended up: oblivion. Their time is up.
The Greens as political parties have outlived their usefulness. When they began they focused almost exclusively on environmental issues — hence the name — and didn’t really have coherent positions on such things as budgets or foreign policy. They still don’t, but since they’ve been invited into governing coalitions, they’ve had to pretend that they do, and it has led them to adopt certain positions that would have had their forbears setting their hair on fire, such as increasing military involvement in Ukraine, or wholehearted support for the mRNA “vaccines”, a form of genetic tinkering that earlier generations of Greens vehemently opposed.
But when nearly every cornerstone of Green party platforms has been adopted by the political mainstream anyway, at least in Europe, Green parties have had to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. They don’t know how best to do that.