"We won't let them get us down"

Having set out to save the world, the Greens are now realising that this world does not want to be saved (…) The reform-minded Greens are coming up against a country that is tired of reform (…) Could it be that at some point the Greens believed that everything would now work itself out? That they no longer need to explain anything because for a moment it seemed as if everyone had realised that the climate crisis is real? (…)

This all sounds kind of right, but we're not saying that, these are all quotes from a dossier on the German Greens that was recently published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and which should make it clear that the Greens are currently in a deep crisis, and not just in Luxembourg.

A few months ago – at least in Germany – the Green world looked very different. At its national congress in the run-up to the municipal elections, the party leadership announced in all seriousness that it not only wanted the mayor's seat in the capital, but also the office of prime minister. The party then also ran with a female national lead candidate for the first time.

Green Waterloo

After the municipal elections on 11 June, the first, albeit already significant, setback came: déi gréng lost 13 municipal seats. In Differdange, where they had previously held the position of mayor (but who was no longer running), they even lost 60 per cent of their voters.

The Greens then experience their Waterloo in the national elections. Not a single one of their nine MPs was re-elected. The East and the North were left completely empty-handed; the ministers from these two districts, Henri Kox and Claude Turmes, did not even manage to win a parliamentary mandate. The party lost two out of four seats in the centre and one out of three in the south, meaning that déi gréng with four seats no longer even has a parliamentary group, which of course has painful financial consequences and is accompanied by equally painful staff cuts, which also affect long-standing employees.