Things are not going well for Robert Habeck. It’s not just the unpopular plans to change the heating system, which not only the opposition, but also the liberal coalition partner, are picking up with gusto. Added to this is the suspicion of nepotism, fueled, of all things, by a wrong decision by Habeck’s probably most important employee. The Greens and their vice-chancellor are suffering at the traffic light, the circumstances and themselves – but it is still too early for green concerns about the next federal election.
The fact that the Greens are struggling with a reputation as moralizers and a ban party is largely due to their great will to change: climate protection, transport, energy, agriculture – the party wants to turn things around. Climate protection, Habeck likes to say, is the wrong word, after all it’s about protecting people and their livelihoods. That’s true, but it can be very exhausting, and the heat pump and its costs can be argued about. The Greens demand a lot from the citizens, and the demands they place on the party are correspondingly high.
The effect of a personnel decision by Habeck’s State Secretary Patrick Graichen, who was involved in the selection of his own best man Michael Schäfer as managing director of the federal German Energy Agency (Dena), is all the more devastating. Both Habeck and Graichen are now talking about a mistake, and Dena is likely to reopen the process. Habeck sticks to Graichen, in the interview format “RND on site” of the editorial network Germany he defended him on Friday as the man “who saved Germany from a serious energy crisis”.
CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja demanded that Habeck dismiss his State Secretary. His loss would weigh heavily on the minister, with Graichen all the threads on the subject of the energy transition come together in the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The matter with the best man became known in a situation in which the ministry was already causing discussions about personnel policy. Graichen’s sister Verena, married to his fellow state secretary Michael Kellner, works like another brother at the Öko-Institut, a research institute that receives orders from the federal government. However, neither Patrick Graichen nor Kellner are involved in their tender, as Habeck asserts. “They don’t go over their desks. They don’t even go over their desks to deal with whether contracts should be awarded in this area.” That sounded better, however, before it became clear that things were going differently when it came to choosing the best man.
Their role in traffic lights is also unpleasant for the Greens, where they are confronted with what they see as an alliance of SPD and FDP brakers on the subject of climate protection. The self-declared “Climate Chancellor” Olaf Scholz is not serious, according to the lawsuit. This raises the question of future alliances with the CDU, which have long been a reality in several federal states – only the path to the CDU in the federal government with its conservative profile-minded boss Friedrich Merz would be much further.
Speaking of alliances: If elections were held now, the traffic light coalition would not achieve its own majority. In individual surveys, the Greens were 14 or 15 percent behind the AfD with 16 percent. In 2021, the year of the last federal election, Fridays for Future brought crowds of people to the streets at climate demonstrations, floods devastated areas in the Ahr Valley and in North Rhine-Westphalia. Today, the Last Generation group is causing a stir, clinging to the streets and wanting to paralyze Berlin – methods that even the Greens now prefer to distance themselves from.
What all this means for the next federal election, which will normally take place in autumn 2025, cannot be predicted today. Half a year can mean an eternity in the political arena. At the beginning of the 2021 election year, Scholz’s chancellor ambitions were only acknowledged by many with a weary smile, the SPD struggled with its loser image. What happened after Armin Laschet (CDU) got out of the race with a laugh in the flood area and Green Party candidate Annalena Baerbock with allegations of plagiarism against her book is well known. The same Baerbock, by the way, who shortly afterwards became one of the most popular members of the government as foreign minister.
When he was still party leader, the story was always that the Greens had skimmed the polls in the middle of the election period, but had not delivered when it came down to it in the end, in the election, Habeck said in the RND interview. “Well, anyway, you can’t say that we’re at a poll high at the moment.” And less flippantly: “Of course it’s going uphill at the moment.” But in 2025, when the Greens have proven that they have acted responsibly with the voters’ mandate, when all questions have been answered, “then we might fight for number one again”.
