Annalena Baerbock no longer wants a leadership role in the Greens

Annalena Baerbock does not want to take a leadership role in the Greens parliamentary group. This emerges from a letter to the parliamentary group and the Green State Association of Brandenburg. The “Spiegel” reports on this, your letter is also available to the dpa news agency in Berlin. Baerbock had been traded as the new co-faction leader. In the letter she explains the personal reasons: “After years on high speed” she wanted to think about a few days “what this moment means for my family and me,” said Baerbock.

Since 2008 she has carried political responsibility with the green, writes the 44-year-old Baerbock. “I always gave everything in all this time.” And further: “At the same time, these intensive years also had a private prize. For personal reasons, I decided to take a step out of the bright spotlight and not to apply for a leading position in the parliamentary group.” Baerbock has already accepted its headquarters in the Bundestag. There is no choice for the party executive. Baerbock emphasizes: “Even if the roles change, this is not a farewell.”

In November, Baerbock and her husband Daniel Holefleisch announced their separation. Both want to continue to take care of the two daughters who are 9 and 13 years old today. The family also wanted to continue living in the common home in Potsdam.

Baerbock is currently Foreign Minister in the outgoing red-green minority government-an office that she would have loved to keep. On the election evening, she had been acted as a likely new Green Group leader, next to the reigning Katharina Dröge from the left wing. Now Dröge and their co-chair Britta Haßelmann, who have just been temporarily confirmed in office, are likely to continue the faction together. Both are close to Baerbock. “With two strong women at their tip, a new chapter for our faction is now beginning,” she writes.

In an interview series over several years, which published the “Zeit” magazine in January, Baerbock described the burdens that the office as Foreign Minister meant for her family with the two daughters. In July 2023, she reported that her children would also need security protection in between. She asked herself: “How much can I expect to my family?”

In September, Baerbock described the “Zeit” magazine an incident with a stalker that one of her daughters had to experience. “And of course there is again worrying that something really breaks or has already broken,” she said at the time.

Already the day after the Bundestag election, Greens Chancellor Robert Habeck announced his retirement from the front row. Baerbock, who supported him as a top candidate, took more time. With Habeck as a co-party leader, Baerbock had broadly positioned the party between 2018 and 2022: the Greens were to become a kind of people’s party with several possible coalition partners.

Even after moving to ministerial offices, Baerbock and Habeck remained the dominant heads of their party. “Today we have almost 100,000 members more than early 2018, the time when Robert Habeck and I were elected as federal chair. We continue to rule successfully in seven federal states,” she writes.

As the first candidate for chancellor in her party, Baerbock led the Greens to the Bundestag election campaign in 2021. A failed election campaign followed a result that was modest a few months earlier compared to the surveys. After all, her book was no longer printed according to allegations of plagiarism. In the traffic light government with SPD and FDP, Baerbock became Foreign Minister and relied on feminist foreign policy, pride of many party friends. At party parliament, she argued for the EU asylum reform criticized by many Greens and prevailed.

After the disappointing result of 11.6 percent in the federal election, the Greens discuss consequences. Representatives of the left party wing, with reference to losses to the Left Party, call for a more liberal migration policy and a stronger focus on social issues. Realos, on the other hand, emphasize that Habeck, with his center course, who aimed at former voters of CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel, had given the party a member boom in the election campaign. In addition, the Greens would also have lost voices to the Union.

In her letter, Baerbock lists points that she booked as a success of the Greens in the unloved traffic light government, including securing energy supply and loosening in citizenship law. “And with all of this, we have remained decent in the traffic light dispute – despite all the impositions that governance demanded to us as a party. My infinite thanks go to all of you that we could always be more controversial in the matter and yet have been loyal and friendly with each other.” The election result and the fact that the Greens no longer ruled hurt. “The right -wing extremists are even more driving me up and the backlash compared to everything.”

Baerbock gives the Greens to master the current challenges if they wanted to build and learn on their successes. “Because in a more rapidly changing world, the recipes of yesterday will not solve today’s challenges. We will continue the way to secure our freedom from party tactics. We will shake ourselves again and again and make it clear that in this turbulent world our role is greater than ourselves.”