The Green Party politician Cem Özdemir wants to replace the previous party leaders of his party in the Bundestag and even move to the top of the MEPs. The former party leader will appear in the new election of the Group Executive Committee on 24 September in a team with the Bremen deputies Kirsten Kappert-Gonther. The letter of application is available to SPIEGEL. The two want to replace Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Anton Hofreiter, who are running for the double top again.
"We are convinced that a fair competition of the group is good - both externally and internally," write 53-year-old Özdemir and 52-year-old Kappert-Gonther in their application. Until the general election, it was about being the smallest political group in parliament "with a new impetus to be the antipode of a weak government". The two make it clear that they aim for the next election campaign in the federal no top candidate. For Green Party, the party leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck are de facto set.
The faction leaders are elected individually and not in the team, but there must be at least one woman. As a rule, both party wings - leftists and so-called realpolitikers - are also at the head of the group. Kappert-Gonther, like Hofreiter, belongs to the party leagues, Özdemir and Göring-Eckardt are "Realos".
"Bear great responsibility"
Özdemir was still party leader in the general election and next Göring Eckardt top candidate of the Greens. After the failure of the talks for a Jamaican coalition with the Union and the FDP, he became chairman of the transport committee in the Bundestag and thus joined the political party in the second row. He had not run again for the party presidency.
The duo Göring Eckardt / Hofreiter leads the faction since October 2013. In the previous parliamentary election in January 2018, the two had received without opposition candidates in each case only about two-thirds of the votes of the 67 Green MEPs.
"We are the smallest opposition faction, but bear great responsibility," write Özdemir and Kappert-Gonther, who sits in the Bundestag since 2017, where she is spokeswoman for the Greens for drug policy. "We want to accept this responsibility together with you and promote us as a team with you as group leader." The group is said to be the "most effective" if everyone can "take an active role and play their own strengths". Collaboration should not be "input from finely divided allotments", but "a common responsibility for projects developed with each other".