While the French Greens seem entangled between internal rivalries and cascading controversies, their German cousins are on the rise.
Building on their series of electoral successes since the Europeans of 2019, the Grünen will indeed appoint this Monday, for the first time in their history, a candidate for the legislative elections in September to succeed Angela Merkel at the Chancellery.
The choice will fall on one of the two co-presidents of the Grünen, Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck, then must be ratified in June at the party congress.
If Merkel's CDU remains at the top of the polls despite its divisions, the Greens, winners of the recent regional elections in the Land of Baden-Württemberg, are following it.
"They take advantage of the wear and tear of the Social Democratic SPD, display their ambition and show their appetite to play their full part in the exercise of power", comments Sébastien Maillard, director of the Jacques Delors Institute and co-author of "Faire l 'Europe in a world of brutes' (Ed. Pluriel).
The proportional ballot is "a guarantee of independence"
What are the differences between the ecologists on each bank of the Rhine?
“Whether at the level of the town halls, the Länder or the federal government, the Grünen have learned since the 1980s to live in coalition with all the parties, from Die Linke - equivalent of the rebels - in Thuringia, to the CDU in Hesse via the SPD of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder formerly, analyzes Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former MEP EELV.
While our Greens are playing "more to the left than me you die".
This political agility, which we would tax here as opportunism, means that they are not so far from entering the Chancellery.
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This pragmatism is certainly a strategic choice of the Grünen, who renounced the leftism and pacifism of yesteryear, but it is also favored by the German electoral system.
"The proportional system changes everything: it allows us to fight for our program first, then to choose our allies after the election, it is a guarantee of independence", underlines Franziska Brantner, influential Green MP in the Bundestag.
While the French presidential election, with its majority vote which eliminates, and the vertical exercise of power are "not in the DNA of the Greens, horizontal party if there is one", according to political scientist Sébastien Maillard.
A "vitamin cure" of 50 billion euros of investment
Would the arrival of the Greens in power in Berlin be a game-changer? It would be a political development for sure. Less orthodox than the CDU on the budgetary plan, they propose a "vitamin cure" of 50 billion euros of investments, made possible thanks to an easing of the debt conditions of the federal state. More ambitious than the SPD on the environment, they want to accelerate the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
But on all issues, they will be ready to compromise with their future allies whoever they are.
"Here is another difference with their French counterparts so intransigent, notes Cohn-Bendit.
In Hesse, for example, because they could not get to free transport, the local Grünen, with their CDU partners, rushed to an agreement for a train-tram-metro-bus pass at 1 euro per day.
Applying part of your program is better than 0% of the program while remaining in the opposition!
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By dint of becoming commonplace in the political landscape, the Grünen could appear dull. The antipodes of the new green mayors of France, who create uproar after uproar, at the risk of deflecting public opinion and offering so many angles of attack to their (many) opponents. "The entry of the Grünen into government in September will be a hell of a challenge for the French Greens, it will force them to rethink their way of doing politics," asserts Cohn-Bendit. MP Franziska Brantner is less severe: "The good results of the Greens in municipal elections in France, highly publicized in Germany, have helped us a lot for our own polls," she welcomes. We were able to extend the European green wave. "
