Germany elections: Robert Habeck to be Green Party’s chancellor candidate

Brussels – Economics Minister Robert Habeck will be the chancellor candidate of the German environmentalists in the upcoming elections, which will be held in February following the collapse of the government of Olaf Scholz, of which the Greens are also a member. The decision was made yesterday (Nov. 17) during the party’s federal congress, which supported the vice chancellor’s nomination with more than 96 per cent of the votes.

After Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his Finance Minister, Liberal leader Christian Lindner, initiating the government crisis that engulfed the shaky “semaphore coalition” (composed of his SPD, the liberals of the FDP and the Greens), the forces in the German political chessboard are positioning themselves to best compete during the early elections scheduled for Feb. 23.

So the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), gathered at a congress in Wiesbaden, not far from Frankfurt, have chosen to put all their eggs in the basket on their most prominent politician, namely the current Economy incumbent in Scholz’s resigning cabinet, Robert Habeck. The vice chancellor garnered 96.48 per cent of the votes cast (741 out of 768) and said he was confident that, in the coming months, the electorate will decide to restore confidence in the ecologists, who currently have around 11 per cent support.

Environmentalists have declared themselves ready to take (or rather keep) government responsibility even if they were to share it with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) of Friedrich Merz, given the lead by all polls with more than 30 per cent. The second force at the federal level is the ultra-right of AfD and, only third, Scholz’s SPD—although the Social Democrats would like to change the losing horse and replace him with Boris Pistorius, Berlin’s popular Defense Minister, to try to contest Merz for the chancellery.

Habeck, after all, has had the chancellery in his sights for quite some time. According to some rumours, he would be the one behind the resignation of the party’s top leadership after the election debacle in the eastern Länder of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg. The new leaders of the Greens are Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak, elected on Saturday (Nov. 16) by the federal assembly of delegates with 78 and 93 per cent of the votes, respectively: the former was secretary of state in Habeck’s ministry, while the latter was elected to the Bundestag in 2021, in the legislature that is now coming to an end.