European election campaign
Climate and young voters: Greens start with Tiktok
The Greens can now also be found on Tiktok. photo
© Robert Michael/dpa
“We don’t want to leave this space to the right,” say the Greens and are now campaigning on Tiktok. How they also want to declare war on the “massive shift to the right”.
55 days before the European elections, the Greens want to add a new one to their tried and tested core issues of climate and environmental protection Tiktok channel score. The proactive election campaign on the platform should show how important young and first-time voters are for the party, said top candidate Terry Reintke when presenting the German Greens’ campaign for the EU parliamentary elections on June 9th.
There were concerns about being present on the Chinese platform. But: “We don’t want to leave this space to the right,” emphasized the party’s political director, Emily Büning. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has also recently been present on Tiktok.
The Green Party’s European election campaign has the motto “Do what counts”. The central issue is the future of the Green Deal, said Reintke, who has been a member of the European Parliament since 2014. It is the Union and right-wing forces that are trying to “put the ax to the Green Deal”. The aim of the program is for the EU to become climate neutral by 2050.
The topics
The Greens want to focus on three topics in the European elections, said Green Party leader Omid Nouripour. “That is peace and security, that is prosperity and climate protection and that is democracy and freedom.” The EU is not an end in itself, but rather an added value, he emphasized. Among other things, they would like to set up a joint agency for a European secret service “that will protect our democracies better and earlier and ward off the intrusions that we see every day.”
According to various surveys, the Greens are between 11 and 16 percent, well behind their best result so far in 2019, when they entered the European Parliament with 20.5 percent. The survey results do not show that the situation is bad, said Federal Chairwoman Ricarda Lang. There is a “stable and consistent voter base,” she said. “It’s important to mobilize them.”
About as many posters are to be hung next to the newly opened Tiktok channel as there were across Germany for the federal election. With slogans like “Thwart the Nazis” or “Only democracy creates freedom,” the Greens want to counteract the “massive shift to the right” that is threatening in the European elections.