More than 1,000 requests for amendments have been received to the Greens’ European election program, often involving small-scale formulations. But when the party debated the draft on Saturday afternoon, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made it clear that for her, the June election was about the big picture: “Those who want to destroy Europe are just waiting for Europe to become part of it the migration issue,” she shouts to the delegates at the party conference in Karlsruhe.
The asylum debate, which is heated up among the Greens, is actually only on the agenda for the evening. But it also plays a major role in the discussion about the European election program. Especially since the right-wing extremist Geert Wilders won the early parliamentary elections in the Netherlands on Wednesday. The populists were just waiting for “order to fail, for humanity to fail,” says Baerbock. That is why a quick agreement on the European asylum system is urgently needed.
There is a lot at stake in the coming European elections for the German and European Greens. In 2019, the German Greens achieved a record result of 20.5 percent and entered the European Parliament with 21 members. At that time, however, climate protection was one of the dominant election campaign topics – that is unlikely to happen again in 2024, as even Baerbock admits: Climate protection is unlikely to be “a hit in the election campaign”.
Funds are tight, but the party is still calling for a massive restructuring of the economy
How the Greens position themselves with their program for the election will likely also become a blueprint for the federal election campaign a year later. The big goal of the party leadership: to move away from the image of resistance and bans and towards one of solutions.
The focus should be an “infrastructure union”. A network of hydrogen and fiber optic lines, power lines and rails, solar panels and wind farms, but also “modern hospitals and reliable daycare centers” is planned. They want to literally connect Europe, says co-party leader Ricarda Lang. The Greens are therefore calling for massive investments in restructuring the economy, even in times of tight budgets in Germany.
However, the fact that the Greens want to break a long-standing taboo with the program is causing heated debates within the party. The party wants to open up to the long-controversial underground storage of carbon dioxide (“Carbon Capture and Storage” – CCS). In the draft, the party leadership refers to those areas of industry where it is hardly possible to do without carbon dioxide – such as the cement industry. Storage could help you on the way to climate neutrality. The party leadership is acting entirely in the spirit of Economics Minister Robert Habeck. His ministry is currently working on its own strategy for “carbon management”, which should also include the use of underground storage facilities – be it in Norway or Denmark.
Environmentalists suspect that the Greens are betraying climate protection
This is an astonishing turnaround for the party. During the 2019 European elections, she rejected CCS as a “risk technology” “because of the unforeseeable dangers” that could threaten health and the environment. Previous election programs sounded similar. For a long time, the Greens’ criticism was entirely in line with the German debate: the capture and storage of carbon dioxide had a difficult time in Germany. There were violent protests in the affected regions.
The environmental camp doesn’t think much of the plans and criticizes the Greens harshly for the change. “The final storage of CO₂ is a risky pseudo solution that will not help the economy on the way to climate neutrality,” says Greenpeace boss Martin Kaiser. The debate about this only serves as an excuse for the industry to delay the conversion to climate-friendly products and processes. “The Greens must now under no circumstances betray climate protection and fall into the CCS trap of the oil and gas industry,” says Kaiser. The environmental association BUND also warns of a “very worrying development”. Such a “180-degree turnaround” was not expected from the Greens in particular.
The Greens chose 36-year-old Terry Reintke from Gelsenkirchen, who is already at the head of the Green group in the European Parliament, as their top candidate for the European elections. She received a strong result of 95 percent. Other well-known faces of the party will no longer run in the June election, such as the former leader of the Green Party in the EU Parliament Ska Keller or the foreign policy expert Reinhard Bütikofer.