The German Greens consult with their bases the new government coalition

Greens Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck. / reuters

The debate on the nominations for the environmental ministers delayed the vote one day

With a day of delay on the plan foreseen by the strong internal debate on the nomination of the candidates for the ministries that have been awarded to them in the next German government, the Greens today began the internal consultation among their 125,000 affiliates to approve the agreement of coalition drawn up with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Liberal Party (FDP) to govern together the recently started legislature. The Greens will have five ministries in the government that will be sworn in at the latest on December 8. Their distribution, already complicated by the forced respect of the female quota, unleashed a fierce struggle among the Germanic ecologists last night between the two wings of the formation, the so-called “realos” or realists and the “fundis »Or fundamentalists, who revived past times of internal disagreements and in which the former prevailed. From the beginning it was clear, however, that the two co-presidents of Los Verdes, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, would win the two sweets in the portfolio distribution agreed with their two partners in the new and unprecedented national government alliance.

Habeck will be the number two of the new executive led by the social democrat Olaf Scholz as prime minister by occupying the federal vice chancellery and also assuming a super-ministry of Economy, Climate Protection and Energy Change created expressly by the demands of environmentalists, while Annalena Baerbock will be the first woman and also the youngest Foreign Minister in the history of the Federal Republic. Both are considered “realos” and to compensate the “fundis” it was agreed that the Family portfolio be occupied by the current head of Environment in the executive of the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Anne Spiegel, and that the Ministry of Environment Atmosphere is led by former party organization secretary Steffi Lemke. Spiegel and Lemke are part of the more left wing of the Greens. The Greens return to power in Berlin 16 years after the governing coalition they formed with the Social Democrats and Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

It was with the nomination of the head of the Ministry of Agriculture that tempers were heated. A portfolio that, despite not being among the most relevant in the cabinet, is of special importance for Los Verdes due to its strategic nature in the fight against climate change and the defense of the environment. In the end and after a long debate, the candidate of the “realos” prevailed, the most pragmatic wing of German environmentalism. The former president of the party and well-known politician of Turkish origin Cem Özdemir took the lead to the detriment of the current parliamentary leader of the Greens, Toni Hofreiter, although he appeared as a safe candidate for one of the portfolios that had to be distributed. Nor will her colleague in the Bundestag as co-chair of the parliamentary environmental group, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, enter the new government. To balance the balance between “fundis” and “realos”, the current vice president of the German lower house and member of the left wing of the party Barbara Roth, will assume the ministry of state for Culture and Media, a position with a rank lower than that of minister.

Members of the German Greens now have a period of nine days to approve the government agreement of the “Ampelkoalition”, the “semaphore coalition” with the SPD and FDP that bears that name because of the color that characterizes each one of them. the three formations. The consultation is held virtually and allows participants to respond by email or SMS. Instead, the Social Democrats will hold an extraordinary congress on December 4 to give the green light to the tripartite pact, while the Liberals will gather their delegates in another extraordinary congress a day later. No one doubts that the affiliates and delegates of the three parties will approve the agreement signed in a 177-page document that was presented this Wednesday in Berlin.