GERMANY: Green Party Leadership Resigns Following Brandenburg Blowout

Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour, co-leaders of the environmentalist Greens have announced their resignations alongside that of the party's executive committee. This follows a string of poor results in state elections held across eastern Germany in September. The Greens lost five of its 12 seats in Saxony, and fell out of both the Thuringian and Brandenburger regional parliaments having fallen below the electoral threshold. In a resignation address, Nouripour said that the party was "in the deepest crisis in a decade".

• The Greens sit as the second-largest party in the federal 'traffic light' coalition alongside the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the pro-business liberal Free Democrats (FDP) under Finance Minister Christian Lindner. The Greens are currently polling at multi-year lows, with the 9.5% support recorded in the latest INSA poll the lowest the party has received since December 2017.
• FAZ reports that "Among the first to be named as potential candidates to succeed [Lang and Nouripour] was foreign policy expert Franziska Brantner, Parliamentary State Secretary to Robert Habeck in the Ministry of Economic Affairs."
• The Greens are looking at a period in opposition after the next election on 28 September 2025. Leader of the main opposition centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz said recently that it was the Greens that his party members were most averse to working with in gov't, potentially limiting the prospect of 'black-green', 'Jamaica' (CDU, Green, FDP) or 'Kenya' (CDU, SPD, Green) coalitions being formed.