Towards the end of the Green Party Congress, things really cracked again. Nevertheless, the federal delegates’ conference is a success for the party leadership: the party accepts difficult compromises, shows insight into the complexity of government existence – and thus strengthens its ministers in the traffic light.
Only 21 votes were missing at the federal party conference in Bonn and Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck and the Greens, who are co-governing in North Rhine-Westphalia, would have had a serious problem. In the event of a majority in favor of a motion by the Green Youth, the party would have demanded nothing less than a renegotiation of the coal compromise in the Rhine district. Not even the applicants themselves expected their demand for a moratorium on the demolition of the town of Lützerath to be so well received. The party leadership and the green federal and state ministers only narrowly avoided disaster.
But on closer inspection, the three-day federal delegates’ conference is a complete success for the Green cabinet members and the party leaders Ricarda Land and Omid Nouripour, who have only been in office for ten months. It was a party congress of unreasonable demands: the party followed its lead on extending the nuclear lifetime, on arms deliveries to Ukraine and arms exports to non-EU countries, and ultimately also on the coal compromise. Not with enthusiasm, but out of insight into the necessities and contradictions of government existence – and accepting a break with important allies from the environmental and climate movement.
This is remarkable because each of these issues scratches at the core of the party’s identity. But many delegates seem willing to pay a painful price for the opportunity to shape government. On their way to the conference center, the delegates and party guests had to pass banners and meetings of opponents of nuclear power and activists for the preservation of Lützerath – they were their allies, with whom they have often demonstrated themselves. And then shortly before the Lützerath vote, climate activist Luisa Neubauer also appeared as a guest speaker and picked apart the party to which she herself belongs. She accused the Greens of nothing less than betraying the Paris climate target for political majorities and approval in mainstream society.
Even the party leadership recognized the subsequent, raging applause for Neubauer as a tipping point at which the majority that was believed to be secure against the motion of the Green Youth melted away like the Alpine glaciers. But despite all the anger that the success of the coal compromise is not recognized, Lang and Co. endured the headwind. They know how much they are asking of their party and that all the frustration about concessions to coalition partners and practical constraints has to break out at some point. It could have turned out worse.
In fact, it is remarkable that the Greens leadership still gets majorities together when they demand nothing less than the willingness of the grassroots to break with Green front-line organizations such as Greenwatch and Fridays for Future. They succeeded because these unreasonable demands were openly addressed as such at the party congress.
In the course of the weekend, the also hotly disputed emergency motion by the party leadership on foreign and security policy included the formulation that the Greens are facing a “dilemma”. They want human rights criteria for arms exports, but they also want more European armaments projects with EU partners who don’t see arms exports so closely. The compromise formula gave Habeck and Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock the necessary legroom to fight for both and at the same time laid down the expectations of the base.
In the question of the operational reserve for two southern German nuclear power plants, which were supposed to be the last German nuclear reactors to go offline at the end of the year together with the Emsland nuclear power plant, the compromise looked similar: party veteran Trittin, with the approval of Habeck and the chairmen, hammered in a few pegs in the text , which are intended to guarantee a final phase-out of nuclear power by April 15, 2023. The delegates grudgingly went with them.
Of all three governing parties, the Greens seem to suffer the least from responsibility, despite the many concessions they too have had to make. On the contrary: the party can still get intoxicated by what it believes can change everything for the better as long as it is in power – even if not immediately and certainly not to the extent it hopes for.
The Greens ministers have emerged stronger from this weekend and neither the SPD nor the FDP need to bet that the Greens will become more discontented in the foreseeable future. However, the near-defeat in the Lützerath question also showed one thing: the grassroots’ willingness to compromise is finite. After this weekend, the Greens are firmly in the traffic light government, but their maneuvering space in this complicated three-way alliance has also become smaller.
