German Greens seek to claw back support
BERLIN: Mired in a plagiarism scandal and falling behind Angela Merkel’s conservatives in the polls, the German Greens will be going on the offensive as they launch their election campaign yesterday. The Greens had surged ahead of the CDU-CSU conservative bloc earlier this year after nominating young hopeful Annalena Baerbock as their candidate to succeed Merkel following Germany’s September 26 election.
But a series of gaffes by Baerbock have left the conservatives as firm favourites to emerge the biggest party in the election-which will see Merkel bow out after 16 years in power. The Greens will lay out their roadmap to the election on Monday, with party co-leader Robert Habeck also embarking on a tour of his home region of Schleswig-Holstein before the campaign proper kicks off in August.
The party will be looking to win back support lost amid missteps by Baerbock, 40, including failing to declare bonuses to the Bundestag, putting inaccuracies in her CV and allegedly plagiarising sections of her campaign book.
Baerbock has acknowledged she made “mistakes” and was “annoyed” with herself, but has since looked increasingly uncomfortable. The former trampolinist has even faced rumours she will step aside in favour of Habeck, though Habeck himself dismissed that theory as “nonsense” in an interview
with the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung at the weekend.
“We have just elected Annalena as our candidate... with almost 100 percent” of the vote at a party congress, he said, insisting there was “no debate” about a possible switch.
But the plagiarism allegations in particular have proven damaging for Baerbock in a country where several ministers have resigned in recent years over similar scandals. After the publication of Baerbock’s book “Jetzt” (Now) in June, an Austrian plagiarism expert wrote an explosive blog post claiming sections of the book were copied from the internet.
Baerbock and her supporters have called the accusations overblown and said the political treatise did not have to meet the same attribution standards as a scientific paper. But the Greens’ ratings have continued to slide, with a poll for the Bild daily on Sunday showing them on just 17 percent-well behind the conservatives on 28 percent.
The CDU-CSU had a dismal start to the year amid anger over the government’s pandemic management, bickering over who to field as their chancellor candidate and a corruption scandal involving shady coronavirus mask contracts. However, the bloc’s ratings have slowly improved since it picked Armin Laschet, 60, as its candidate to succeed Merkel, and with the launch of its election manifesto in late June.
‘Chancellor by default’
Baerbock had also been ahead of Laschet in surveys of which personality Germans would prefer to see as their next chancellor. But a recent poll had the North Rhine-Westphalia state premier in front on 25 percent, with Baerbock behind on 19 percent.
With the environment shaping up to be a key issue on the campaign trail, Laschet on Sunday promised to speed up efforts for Germany to achieve its goal of becoming climate neutral by 2045. “If we want fewer people to fly, we have to build railways faster, for example. Everything is going much too slowly,” he said.
He also called for greater international cooperation to tackle climate change, insisting that “without China, without Russia, without other major players, it won’t work”. But critics say Laschet’s current success in the polls has less to do with his platform and more to do with the flat-footed campaign of the Greens.
The CDU-CSU alliance “has Annalena Baerbock to thank for its comfortable position”, Der Spiegel magazine wrote on Saturday. “At the moment it looks as though (Laschet) will almost become chancellor by default,” it said.