Germany’s Greens face battle to retain young climate vote

As a former professional trampolinist, Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock knows that what goes up must come down. Last April, her party was riding high in first place on 28 per cent in polls; two months later the 40-year-old was already being feted as Germany’s likely first Green chancellor.

Five months on, after a series of gaffes and robust campaign pushback from rivals, the Greens are down 10 points to 18 per cent but still optimistic they will take office and shape German policy after the September 26th federal election.

Two days before then, another global climate strike will, Green strategists hope, mobilise their electorate and win over a late wave of converts to their core political agenda.

Climate change is uppermost in voters' minds, according to polls, but on the campaign trail Green leaders have yet to find the ideal frequency to reach German voters who want to do the right thing by the planet – just not now.

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“We invented the car, we invented the bicycle and together we can also create a climate neutral industry,” said Baerbock in a can-do Hamburg campaign speech that was far more optimistic than the rainy weather. “As tight as the polls are right now, we’re fighting for every vote.”

After years owning climate politics, the Green Party has seen rivals – and potential future coalition partners – make their own climate pitch to voters in this campaign.

The centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is promising green politics that insulate low-earners from higher costs; this week the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) launched a plan to green Germany’s manufacturing economy and become a “climate-neutral industrial country”.

Key demands

Weeks after devastating floods in western Germany that killed 180 people, the Greens hope voters will still choose the original. Their key demands: a two-degree temperature rise limit; more ambitious goals and timelines to end fossil fuel energy production and CO2 production; and an “energy allowance” for low-earners facing higher bills.

Other plans include higher rates for top earners and a wealth tax, which dovetail with SPD ambitions, as do a higher minimum wage of €12, a rent cap and more flexible rules on balanced budgets.

A recent surge in support for the SPD, currently leading polls on 25 per cent, has upset plans of senior Green figures for an as-yet untested CDU-Green alliance.

Party insiders say senior Green figures are salivating at two likely paths back to power for the first time since 2005. Hard-core climate activists, fearing the prospect of power will weaken Greens’ policy ambition in coalition talks, have broken away to form their own party, the “Klima Liste” or Climate List.

“We’re reacting to the fact that, at federal level, there is still no party with a programme to keep temperature rises to within a 1.5 degree limit,” the party says in its programme. “We’re closest to the Greens but we find their programme, on several points, doesn’t go far enough.”

The split has divided younger climate campaigners, particularly the German faces of Fridays for Future such as Jakob Blasel. The 20-year-old campaigner turned Green parliamentary candidate is a self-described “1.5 degree ultra”. But he thinks votes for the Climate List will “evaporate” and split the climate vote.

“I am for as much climate justice as possible but this path will not work,” he said.

Undecided

Election analysts say this election will be decided by Germany’s under-30 vote: 8.4 million young Germans among whom the Greens attract up to 30 per cent. But 38 per cent of under-30s are still undecided.

In the first of a series of television debates last Sunday, Baerbock warned viewers that a vote for the Greens would break a CDU-SPD political cartel that has ruled Germany for 12 of the last 16 years. Aside from winning over voters, her main challenge until polling day and beyond is to keep her own party on side. “For a supposedly feminist party, the powerful older men in this party are refusing to support Baerback,” said one Green Bundestag insider. “If the voters only knew their chauvinist contempt for Baerbock.”