Upheaval in the NRW Greens after election success: New leadership wanted

Created: 06/15/2022Updated: 06/15/2022 15:25

The incumbent Greens leader Mona Neubaur.

© Roberto Pfeil/dpa/archive image

After their electoral success, the Greens will soon be co-governing in NRW for the first time if everything goes according to plan.

The party is now rearranging its staff.

First consequence: The Greens need a new dual leadership.

Dusseldorf - After the success in the state elections, the Greens in North Rhine-Westphalia are reorganizing themselves.

At a party conference on June 25th and 26th in Bielefeld, a new dual leadership will be elected.

The incumbent chairmen Mona Neubaur and Felix Banaszak are no longer standing.

Both politicians announced this on Wednesday in personal statements for the party base, which are available to the German Press Agency.

According to information from the party, there were initially no official applications for the future dual leadership.

Neubaur (44) has been the head of the Greens since 2014 and, together with CDU Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst, is leading the coalition negotiations for the first black-green government alliance in NRW.

The Greens' top candidate indicated that she would like to work in a responsible position in the future black-green coalition.

"I am confident that we will be able to agree on a good substantive basis - and it would be a great honor for me to be able to implement it in a responsible position with clarity, compass and optimism for our party," she wrote.

Neubaur had won a parliamentary mandate in the state elections in mid-May.

She is being treated as the future economics and climate protection minister in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The approximately 280 delegates at the Green Party Congress on the weekend after next are also to vote on the coalition agreement.

Neubaur recalled that she had started with the aim of opening up the party more, getting "out of the comfort zone" and building new bridges.

Banaszak (32) has been co-party leader in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2018 and was elected to the Bundestag last year.

Banaszak made it clear in his statement that he would not be a member of the new NRW state government.

"I have decided that my place in the next few years is in the parliamentary group."

The North Rhine-Westphalia Greens largely separate office and mandate.

Only a third of the members of the state executive board may also be members of the Bundestag, state parliament or European parliament.

Party leaders are also not allowed to be members of the federal, state or EU Commission governments.

On June 25, both the CDU and the Greens want to vote on the coalition agreement at their party conferences.

If these bodies agree, Prime Minister Wüst is then to be re-elected in the state parliament on June 28.

In the state elections on May 15, the CDU emerged as the clear winner with 35.7 percent.

The SPD slipped to 26.7 percent.

The Greens were able to almost triple their share of the vote compared to 2017 to 18.2 percent and ended up in third place.

The FDP fell to 5.9 percent.

As a result, the CDU had to look for a new coalition partner.

With Neubaur and Banaszak at the top, the NRW Greens had worked their way out of their 2017 low.

The party has since more than doubled its membership to around 26,000.

Banaszak explained that he could not imagine a better farewell to the state presidency than bringing the Greens back into government responsibility in North Rhine-Westphalia after five years of opposition.

dpa