Negotiated for a long time, but lost: three days of impertinence for the Greens

Wednesday morning, 7:15 a.m., after the marathon meeting of the coalition committee. Green leader Ricarda Lang doesn’t even try to hide her dissatisfaction when she gives an interview on Deutschlandfunk. It was “a difficult step” for the Greens to agree to the acceleration of 144 freeway projects, and the compromise hurts, she says.

It’s the one big toad the Greens had to swallow. What has been decided is not enough to meet the climate protection goals, says Lang.

For the Greens, the past three days have been an impertinence. As is usually the case after this type of conversation, a winner and a loser are chosen, only this time there is no need to search. The Greens feel like losers, that’s obvious. According to the majority opinion, the winner is the FDP.

After more than 30 hours of negotiations, the coalition partners of the SPD, FDP and Greens rewrote the paper with the title: “Modernization package for climate protection and planning acceleration”. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, SPD, called the result “a large piece of work”. After that, it doesn’t feel like it for the Greens. They think they only prevented the worst plans of the FDP and SPD when it came to climate protection.

The Greens feel like losers

A few hours after the interview, the Greens invited journalists to a background discussion. You can’t quote from it, but you can say this much: you’re disappointed, but you don’t want to get out of the coalition either. Times are too serious for that.

Anyone who goes to the FDP’s background discussion in the Hans-Dietrich-Genscher-Haus after the Greens’ appointment notices how different a result can appear. There are about 950 meters between the party headquarters, but this Wednesday it feels like they are in different worlds. You can’t quote from that either, only this much: The FDP is in a good mood. The five lost state elections? Forget, at least for a moment.

Wissing no longer has to be held solely responsible for missed climate protection goals

They are happy about the softening of the sector targets in the climate protection law. In the future, FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing will no longer be solely responsible for the fact that his area regularly misses the climate protection targets. At a press conference later, he praised it as good that “this misunderstanding” had been clarified.

The entire government is now to be held jointly liable if the targets are not met. Many Greens fear that this will shift responsibility from one house to the next, with no one feeling responsible in the end.

It’s the second big toad the Greens had to swallow. In return they received: The promise that the heat transition, with which heating in Germany is to be CO2-neutral in the future, will be initiated.

And the truck toll, which the Greens see as the only real success. Money is thus flowing into the expansion of the rail infrastructure, for which the coalition estimates the additional investment required by 2027 at 45 billion euros.

But what does that mean with a coalition when the losers and winners are so clearly defined? One thing is clear in all the statements: the feeling of the Greens, SPD and FDP would have allied against them on climate protection issues.

Social Democrats and Liberals put it this way: There was a draft text that was also worked out in coordination with the Greens. Accordingly, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, SPD, spoke to the most important ministers both in Meseberg and on a trip to Japan.

There were no more points in the paper that were not already in the original version. The Greens had to withdraw to internal consultations several times because their own position was not clear.

According to the Greens, however, the paper was not coordinated. The points that are important for the Greens did not make it. In general, only after hours of tough negotiations during the first night session did the talks start to move. It is difficult to say which version is correct.

But one person who seemed significantly less contrite than his party friends, at least on Tuesday evening, was Economics Minister Robert Habeck. The Vice-Chancellor of the Greens joined the ZDF program “Lanz” and praised the result as a “pragmatic solution”. He was proud of the Greens, mainly because “we were able to give the other side their space.”

“We were able to give the other side their space too.”

Robert HabeckVice-Chancellor and Economics Minister of the Greens

This is typical of Habeck’s conciliatory political style. In their own ranks, however, this style is also viewed with suspicion. A good communicator, a bad negotiator, that’s how he is described from his own ranks.

Dissatisfaction with the outcome of the negotiations runs through the entire party, with the Green Youth being particularly clear. “The traffic light started with the claim that it is the last government that can still influence the climate crisis. This coalition doesn’t seem to do it justice,” Timon Dzienus, spokesman for the Green Youth, told the Tagesspiegel. Dzienus considers the 16-page decision to be completely inadequate.

The strategic problem of the party

The party has a strategic problem: on the one hand, the environmental movement is attacking them because the Greens suffer most from their pressure. The German Environmental Aid called the coalition’s paper a “disaster”. On the other hand, the Greens planned to expand, to open up new groups of voters. However, it is being pushed back into its role as a climate protection party by the Social Democrats and Liberals. It then seems as if she is mainly making clientele politics.

In the Bundestag during question time, the Union of traffic lights accuses of undermining the climate protection law. “Softening the climate protection law instead of complying with it, how can you take responsibility for that?” calls Union politician Andreas Jung. Scholz is relaxed. “Thank you for your question,” he says, rejecting the criticism that the law is becoming even more ambitious.

Robert Habeck sits next to it. And unlike the night before with Lanz, he looks tired. It’s getting more uncomfortable in traffic lights, especially for the Greens.

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