KFor a moment it looked like a surprise. On election Sunday, Berlin’s Greens were temporarily in first place. Then Bettina Jarasch would have become the first Green in the Red City Hall – but in the end the SPD with Franziska Giffey was ahead. The 52-year-old trained journalist Jarasch can say that she led the Greens to their best result in Berlin with 18.9 percent.
But the party did not succeed in converting its polls, which reached up to 27 percent, into an election victory, even in Berlin. Berlin’s greens are too much attached to the worlds of the inner city, they have less of an eye on the entire city.
Jarasch, largely unknown to Berliners, has fought a diligent election campaign. But she often seemed insecure in appearance. She couldn’t hide the fact that she lacked administrative experience. Jarasch describes herself as a “bridge builder” who can bring different forces together. That can be important for coalition talks. A three-party coalition is needed in Berlin. Unlike Giffey, Jarasch wants to continue the alliance with the SPD and the left. But she’s already talking to the FDP.
She wishes for “more Bullerbu” for Berlin
The green woman often comes to her appointments by bike, she no longer has a car. Berliners in the outskirts do not find the fact that they largely ban car traffic from the city center, want to reduce parking spaces and streets for more greenery and more bike paths – like Jarasch’s sentence that they want “more Bullerbü” for the capital.
Jarasch did not join the Greens until 2009, when she had already worked as a consultant for the MPs Christa Nickels and Renate Künast. Two years later she was state chairman and was able to pacify the divided Berlin party. But when she wanted to join the Bundestag in 2017, the Greens let her fail the list. When she said at a party conference that as a child she wanted to be an “Indian chief”, she was severely criticized by the party for using the incorrect word for Native American people.
Criticism of her wish to be “Inian chief”
Jarasch comes from Augsburg, her father was a paper wholesaler there, and with his mother he founded a respected forum for intercultural education. The grandmother, a Jew who converted to Protestantism, survived the Nazi period only with luck. Jarasch came to Berlin to study philosophy in 1992, her southern German accent can still be heard today.
After many years in Kreuzberg, she recently moved to Wilmersdorf with her husband, a journalist, and their two young sons. Jarasch cast her vote at the polling station in the Evangelical Gymnasium at the Gray Monastery, one of the city’s elementary high schools, which the Greens want to be abolished.
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