The entire Green Party executive committee, including chairmen Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, has resigned en masse. The party needs a “fresh start,” said Lang.
The Green Party leadership is drawing personnel consequences following the party’s failures in several elections. Co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour announced on Wednesday in Berlin that the entire party executive committee would resign in November. “We need a fresh start,” said Nouripour. A new executive committee is to be elected at the federal party conference in mid-November. The news portal “Table Media” had previously reported this.
The Greens suffered drastic losses in the last four elections – the European elections and the state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. In Brandenburg they more than halved their result. They were thrown out of two state parliaments. In Saxony alone they narrowly managed to get back into the state parliament.
Green Party leadership resigns: “We need new faces”
“We need new faces to lead the party out of this crisis,” Lang said. “Now is not the time to cling to our chairs. Now is the time to take responsibility and we are taking on this responsibility by enabling a fresh start,” she added.
Lang and Nouripour were elected co-chairs at the end of January 2022. They are relatively popular in the party. Many Green members give them credit for the fact that there were no rivalries or differences of opinion between them – unlike some of their predecessors. The current federal executive board was actually elected for two years in November 2023. In addition to Lang and Nouripour, it also includes deputy party leaders Pegah Edalatian and Heiko Knopf, managing director Emily Büning and federal treasurer Frederic Carpenter.
Nouripour had already sounded relatively resigned on Monday. He spoke of a bitter defeat in Brandenburg and at the same time expressed dismay at the state of the traffic light coalition. “The big Feng Shui moment will probably not come, and no one believes me anymore when I say that,” he said after deliberations of the party executive. “We are doing our work, we are trying to move the country forward and we feel bound by the coalition agreement, by what has been agreed upon,” said the Green Party leader. “But that is it.”
Scholz: “No impact on the coalition”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not expect the resignation of the Green Party leadership to have any consequences for the traffic light government. “This has no impact on the coalition,” said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit on Wednesday in Berlin. Green Party leaders Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour will remain in office until their successors are decided at the Green Party’s federal delegates’ meeting in mid-November. This will not create a personnel gap or a power vacuum.
Scholz has taken note of the resignation, Hebestreit continued. The Chancellor has always “worked closely and trustingly” with both and regrets this step.
Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck has described the announced resignation as a “great service to the party”. Habeck told the German Press Agency: “This step shows great strength and foresight. Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are proving what the party leadership means to them: responsibility. They are paving the way for a powerful new beginning. This is not a given, it is a great service to the party.”
Habeck continued: “We have had tough months behind us, the Greens were facing a lot of headwinds.” The defeats in the last elections were undoubtedly influenced by the federal trend. “We all bear responsibility here, including me. And I, too, want to face it.”
Shortly after her announcement, several political colleagues also spoke up and expressed their respect for the decision. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann from the FDP thanked everyone on “X” for the “pleasant human cooperation”. At the same time, she stressed that the “renewal process” was an internal process for the Greens, but that “every actor must carefully consider what consequences they will draw from it.” This is probably a hint to the traffic light coalition.
“We have always discussed and clarified things together at the head of our two parties in a reliable and trusting manner,” said a joint statement by SPD leaders Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil. “Despite some differences in content, this partnership was very pleasant because it was also resilient on a human level.” Therefore, Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang are thanked “from the bottom of their hearts.” They did not make any statements about possible effects on the traffic light coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP.
CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann called on the traffic light government to hold early elections. “Our country will not be able to cope with another year of ‘traffic light’,” Linnemann told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” on Thursday. “There is no way around new elections.”
The parliamentary manager of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Thorsten Frei, sees the change at the top of the Greens as a sign of the disintegration of the traffic light coalition. “The centrifugal forces in the traffic light coalition are continuing to increase,” the CDU politician told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday. “With the resignation of the entire Green Party executive, the coalition is crumbling in front of the cameras.”
The chairman of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael Roth of the SPD, said: “You have had to endure a lot. Drawing personal consequences is never easy. You are showing courage and attitude. Thank you for so much! All the best!”
Note from the editors: This article has been updated several times.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
