“The Greens are to blame!” At some point in 2024, when the popular frustration with outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ permanently bickering governing coalition of center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Greens, and pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) was at a high, it became fashionable to fault the Green Party for all that was wrong with Germany and the world at large.
For sure, the Greens’ reputation had suffered the previous year when Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, also Germany’s economy and climate minister, presided over the catastrophically botched introduction of a new “boiler law.” At first it appeared—also thanks to misleading tabloid press coverage—that the government meant to force homeowners to rip out their oil and gas heating systems and replace them with costly heat pumps in a matter of months.
The long row over the new law, which was finally passed with many modifications, reinforced the Green Party’s image of a “Verbotspartei”—a party ready to outlaw everything and anything to reach climate neutrality and allegedly “woke” ideological purity. The backlash, however, was so overblown that the satirical television “heute show” came up with a spoof medication ad: Take your “The Greens are to blame” pill and rest assured that it was indeed the Greens who were pulling the strings when your toast that fell on the floor landed on the jam side.
Not the Biggest Loser
At the February 23 election, the Greens suffered—but not as much as the SPD, which registered a historically bad result with only 16.4 percent of the vote (down from 25.7 percent in 2021), and the FDP, which dropped out of the parliament altogether with 4.3 percent (it had won 11.4 percent in 2021). The Greens ended up with 11.7 percent, down from 14.7 percent in 2021, and likely became victims of a late-surging hard-left Die Linke party, which promised even more radical change without having to worry about becoming part of the next government. In contrast, the Greens signaled they would be ready for another coalition.
In the end, they weren’t needed. Because the anti-immigration, pro-Putin Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) narrowly failed to cross the parliamentary 5-percent “hurdle” with 4.98 percent, Friedrich Merz’ center-right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the SPD won just enough seats to build a two-way coalition.
But there was a problem, which Habeck already highlighted on election night. In the next Bundestag, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Die Linke will hold more than one-thirds of the seats and will be able to build a blocking minority, which would make constitutional changes required for greater debt-financed spending impossible. However, the “old” parliament, where the CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens held more than two-thirds of the seats, was constitutionally allowed to sit for another month.
Granting Fiscal Space
And so it came to pass. With Merz quickly U-turning on decades-old fiscal policy dogma and agreeing with his future SPD coalition partner to potentially spend up to €1 trillion on infrastructure and defense over the next decade, the Greens were needed to provide a two-thirds majority to make it happen.
Astonishingly, Merz had made no preparations for such a turn of events. Rather, the Greens had been the CDU/CSU’s favorite punching ball during the campaign. Merz now had to clumsily leave a voicemail on one of the Greens’ parliamentarian leaders’ phone to establish contact. The conditions the Greens then negotiated with the prospective governing parties puts Germany on a quite different path than CDU/CSU and SPD alone would have wanted. SPD leader Lars Klingbeil afterwards admitted that the wrangling with the Greens until the early hours had “improved on our financial package.”
The Greens’ demands included making sure the new €500 billion infrastructure “special fund,” anchored in the constitution, will not be used for cross-finance “consumptive” spending such as pension goodies or tax cuts promised by the CDU/CSU in particular. It also reintroduced climate policy and the Germany’s green energy transformation into the package. They also managed to widen the definition of defense expenditure: Civil defense, the intelligence services, and also “support for states under military attack contravening international law” (read: Ukraine) will fall under this category. Defense spending exceeding 1 percent of GDP will now be exempted from the “debt brake” rules (which limits new government borrowing to 0.35 percent of GDP.)
Thanks to the Greens, the prospective Merz government has won huge fiscal space, which Scholz never had. It is the crucial foundation for what Germany now needs—contributing to enabling Europe to defend itself on its own, with much-reduced (or in the worst case scenario: no) US support. The details now need to be agreed in, likely at time torturous, coalition negotiations between the CDU/CSU and SPD, but the big financial package has the potential to make the German economy grow again, after two years of recession.
Thanks to the Greens
The Greens have thus proved themselves in a historical moment as Germany’s “most loyal opposition” while technically still in government. The other opposition parties did not step up, but criticized, or vilified, the supporters of the package. The BSW, followed by the AfD, and also parts of Die Linke has already started to denounce the package as “Kriegskredite,” or war loans, a loaded German term from World War I, putting the next government and the Greens in the same box as the chauvinistic leadership of Imperial Germany. Some within the Greens worry that it might get traction if the CDU/CSU-SPD government fails to ensure that its overall policies are socially just.
For the Greens, with Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak as party leaders, a new period begins, back on the opposition benches. Habeck has signaled that he will leave frontline politics, at least for a while, and his former co-leader, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, is not doing her reputation much good by angling for a United Nations top job that had already been promised to Helga Schmid, one of Germany’s most experienced career diplomats. Why exactly Baerbock so desperately wants to become the largely representative president of the UN Assembly is unclear since at the time of making her moves behind the scenes, she also let the Green parliamentary group know that she wanted to step back for family reasons.
Regardless of the fate of their now former top politicians, Germany’s Greens are likely to continue to influence German and European politics in more profound ways than often meets the eyes. They may not have been able to turn themselves into a “people’s party” (Volkspartei), representing the many strata of German society the way the CDU/CSU still just about manages, while the SPD has lost that quality. But whether on geopolitics —Baerbock condemned German reliance on Russian gas before 2022, Habeck was the first to come out for weapons deliveries to Ukraine—or fiscal policy, the “bigger parties” have, in the end, followed their lead. They will do so again.
Henning Hoff is executive editor of INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY.
