On site
Party conference in Karlsruhe
Green Party leader Nouripour on the moment he almost gave up
Omid Nouripour: Last year he was on the “edge of giving up,” said the Green party leader.
© Chris Emil Janßen / Imago Images
At the Green Party conference, Omid Nouripour is running for re-election as chairman – and he is getting personal. He ends with Luther: “I’m standing here and I can’t do anything else.”
Suddenly it becomes very quiet in the exhibition hall in Karlsruhe. The Greens gathered there for the party conference to balance their course in “turned times” (Habeck), but also to elect their party leadership, among other things. The Co-Chairman Omid Nouripour is running for re-election and may have given some of the approximately 800 delegates goosebumps with a personal confession in his speech.
Last year he was “on the verge of giving up,” says Nouripour, and then speaks specifically for the first time about the fact that family members in Iran had to suffer because of his political work. After he commented on the “courageous women” in Iran, he received calls for help: relatives called him and asked him if he could “make it quieter.” They felt acutely threatened by the regime – so the Green Party leader was faced with the specific question of the extent to which he was endangering them with his work. In his speech he added: “And not everyone survived.”
After the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa With Amini in police custody, mass protests broke out in Iran in September 2022, which were brutally suppressed. After the protests began, the high-profile foreign politician, who has both German and Iranian citizenship, called, among other things, for the Revolutionary Guards in Iran to be placed on the EU’s terror list.
Nouripour: “I’m standing here and I can’t do anything else”
After this terrible news from his relatives, it was “extremely difficult” to regain control, said Nouripour, who grew up in Tehran and came to Germany with his family at the age of 13. But he couldn’t be quiet, said Nouripour. He then leans on Luther’s famous words: “I’m standing here and I can’t do anything else,” says the 48-year-old. Applause erupts in the hall.
Nouripour was subsequently re-elected by the delegates with 79.1 percent, but received fewer votes than in his first election as party leader two years ago. He continues to lead the party together with Lang; the 29-year-old has 82.3 percent in Karlsruhe.
In the past, Nouripour has repeatedly said that for him, as a young politically interested person with a migrant background, the Greens were actually the only option – as a party in which his origins played no role. “My story would not have been possible in any other party,” emphasizes the old and new party leader in Karlsruhe.
His speech leads to – so far – the second moment of emotion at this year’s party conference. The evening before, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, visibly moved, describing her encounter with an Israeli man. Before the Hamas terrorist attack, he said goodbye to his wife and two children without suspecting anything bad. And haven’t seen her since.