The German Green party has endured another disappointing election night in the country’s smallest state, Bremen, as voters voice concerns about the social consequences of green transformation projects.
The northern city state’s incumbent Social Democratic party mayor, Andreas Bovenschulte, emerged top in projected results from Sunday’s poll published by the local statistics office, with about 29.5% of the vote. This gives the centre-left the option to either continue governing with the Greens and the left-wing Die Linke, or form a “grand coalition” with the second-placed conservatives.
Support for the German Greens, who have been in government at national level since December 2021, slid to 11.7%, down 5.6 percentage points compared with state elections in 2019, providing another sobering moment for the environmentalist party after an underwhelming result at Berlin’s repeat state elections in February.
With only 475,500 eligible voters, the election in Germany’s smallest state is not considered a bellwether poll. Bovenschulte’s personality ratings played a strong role in the SPD’s strong showing, and national Green party leaders on Monday attributed their poor performance down to “local mistakes”.
A month before the vote, Bremen’s Green transport senator, Maike Schaefer, had provoked local ire by scrapping the so-called “bread-roll button” in one of the city’s districts, a short-term free parking option at parking ticket machines designed to give locals just enough time to pop into a high-street bakery. On Monday, Schaefer announced she was stepping down from her post and retiring from politics.
Parallels between the votes in Bremen and Berlin, however, will trouble the Green’s leadership. Even among a progressively minded urban electorate, the party was punished as it set about turning promises to reduce carbon emissions into action: Green voters who like the idea of car-free cities are now also concerned about the social consequences.
The question whether the party’s stated mission to make the German economy more green will sufficiently heed citizens’ concerns has also been raised at a national level, where the Green economic minister, Robert Habeck, has endured a backlash against his plans to electrify the country’s gas-reliant heating sector.
“Voters are scared of change, be it in their boiler room or on inner-city streets,” wrote news magazine Der Spiegel in response to the Bremen vote. “The Greens are not able to meet these fears at eye-level and with respect.”
Bremen was the first state parliament that the Green party entered in 1979. But as the state with the highest rates of unemployment and social benefit recipients, it is also a region that will always put the party’s credibility on social issues to the test.
On Monday, the German Green’s co-leader Ricarda Lang said that while her party would hold on to its core ecological projects, it had to get better at connecting these projects to “the material core of social security”.
