Omid Nouripour has to laugh at himself for a moment. The Green Party chairman was asked at the party’s executive board meeting at the start of the year whether he was concerned about the Greens’ less-than-exciting poll numbers. Well, replies the Green politician, we don’t want to get drunk, we want to approach things soberly. Speaks it and then quickly becomes serious again. Because the Greens – like all traffic light partners – are likely to have a difficult election year.
Of all three traffic light parties in the current surveys, the Greens are still closest to their result from the 2021 federal election, while the SPD and FDP have worse values. But the Greens are also far behind their ambitions as a governing party, and the mood in the eco-party is depressed to bad.
Because people in the country don’t respond well to traffic lights and dissatisfaction with the government under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz is very high. The Green Party leadership sees it partly as their own fault, but partly as a result of the world situation with various major crises. And has planned a lot for the new year, some of which are remarkably different from previous approaches. Ricarda Lang and Nouripour, who have just been re-elected, want to set a new course for their party. Lang calls it “regaining trust and providing security.” Her party’s aim is to convey “courage and confidence” not as a “naive formulation” but as a signal of departure. She advocates that, given the current strength of the AfD, the democratic parties should not get lost in lamentation, i.e. tearfulness, about how bad everything is. Rather, the mission is to show “that we can do better.”
Lang also blames the government alliance of the SPD, Greens and FDP for the loss of trust. “We as traffic lights have tripped each other up too often in the last two years,” she says. Good compromises, for example, were talked out. And so she doesn’t want to change anything about the budget compromise that has just been found and the gradual end to agricultural subsidies, for example.
What else specifically follows from these considerations? Lang announced that the Greens wanted to change the law again in order to increase the minimum wage from the current twelve euros to around 14 euros “as quickly as possible”. This would mean that the government would once again ignore the minimum wage commission made up of unions and employers, after the increase to twelve euros on October 1, 2022 had already been decided by the traffic light majority. However, the Green Party leader leaves it open whether she expects the approval of the FDP, which considers any further political interference in the minimum wage level to be wrong.
The Green Party leadership also spoke about labor market policy in the morning with IG Metall Chairwoman Christiane Benner and with the President of the Federal Employment Agency, Andrea Nahles. Among other things, it was about solutions to the problem of the shortage of skilled workers. In addition to the immigration of skilled workers and workers and making it easier for refugees living in Germany to take up work, Lang also points to efforts to combat the unemployment of young people without a school qualification and to make it easier to combine family and work.
Nouripour also makes it clear, for example with regard to climate protection: “We don’t want to go out and say ‘we’re proselytizing you’, we want to take people with us,” he says. It’s not about simply enforcing climate protection per se, but rather making people aware of what they get out of it – including economically. “Others talk about gender, we focus on the big issues,” the Green Party leader also emphasizes. Now the Greens are known to have no problem with gender. But they have the problem that social changes are held against them in particular by those who reject them and hope that as much as possible stays as it is. And in the current situation there are not that few. When asked about this, Lang thinks briefly: Then she says that she is also experiencing a “great crisis fatigue” in her circle of friends and the population as a whole and, based on this, a kind of “frustration for change” that is primarily blamed on her party. We have to move away from this, the Greens would do their part. So thoughtful expressions at the start of the year. But the learning curve, as someone said on the sidelines of the exam, has increased significantly. Everyone is united in the hope that things will get better and that the Greens will be at the forefront again.