A faction of the left within the German Greens has spoken out against the party’s chancellor candidate, Robert Habeck, following the party’s poor performance in the recent federal election.
Sven-Christian Kindler, a budget expert, told the Spiegel, “We should not gloss over this election result.” Some members of the Greens had “put themselves at risk by conservative narratives on migration” Kindler said.
Habeck had presented a ten-point plan to tighten asylum policy after the Aschaffenburg attack and the hard asylum course of Union chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. “The uncoordinated ten-point plan with the mixing of security policy and asylum policy was a mistake” Kindler criticized. During the election campaign, the Greens had “not taken enough distance from the Union on central issues like flight and migration.”
Despite the strategy, allegedly inspired by Merz to primarily attract female voters to the Greens, not having worked, the “Merkel gap” did not exist, Kindler said. A rejuvenating left party, which does not want to govern, had profited from this. One can see in the success of the Left Party that one can win voters with progressive themes.
The Greens had achieved a lot in the coalition government for social justice and a modern immigration society, Kindler said. However, the party’s credibility had “suffered due to our communicated overpragmatism in the last three years, which has made it easy for the Left Party.