Party conference
Green Party leaders Lang and Nouripour re-elected
The chairmen of Alliance 90/The Greens remain: Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang. photo
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
The two Green Party leaders Lang and Nouripour are continuing. The delegates at the party conference in Karlsruhe granted them a second term in office. But one of them gets a worse result than the first time.
Lang received 82.3 percent of the vote, Nouripour 79.1 percent. Schmagold came in at 12.0 percent. The election, which was carried out using digital voting machines, is to be confirmed with pen and paper at the party conference in Karlsruhe, with results expected to be available on Saturday.
Lang achieved a better result than her first election. She received 75.93 percent of the votes at a digital party conference in January 2022. At that time, the election still had to be confirmed by letter, and she received 78.73 percent of the vote. Nouripour did worse: he initially received 82.6 percent in 2022 and 91.7 percent in the later postal vote, with two opposing candidates.
Lang comes from Baden-Württemberg and considers himself to be on the left wing of the party. She has been with the Greens since 2012 and was also head of the youth organization Green Youth. Her focus is social policy. Nouripour is a Realo and long-time member of the Bundestag from Frankfurt with a focus on foreign policy.
Lang and Nouripour work together without any apparent problems. Both appear less profiled than their predecessors at the party leadership, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, who are now attracting significantly more attention as ministers. They are continuing Habeck and Baerbock’s course and trying to make the Greens more electable to more people beyond the core clientele – which, according to surveys, has recently been less successful.
In her application speech, Lang emphasized the successes of the Greens as part of the traffic light coalition with the SPD and FDP. “I am so incredibly proud of what we have achieved in the last two years,” said Lang, who mentioned, among other things, securing the gas supply last winter, the 49-euro ticket and the abolition of paragraph 219a, i.e. the advertising ban for abortions. But Lang was also self-critical. The Greens are not always able to reach people. At times when her party was in trouble, she sometimes slipped into “technocratic” behavior.
“In my view, the traffic light and we as the Greens need an even stronger focus on social justice,” Lang wrote in her new application for the office. “We need a new promise of justice for the broad spectrum of society – from good collective wages to investments in infrastructure and a reliable welfare state.”
Nouripour particularly emphasized the good cooperation with Lang. When asked about the mood in the traffic light coalition, he admitted: “We have too much argument.” That has to be less. He encouraged his party. “The most important thing is what arrives in the country and not how we feel about it.” In response to a question about private sea rescue in the Mediterranean, Nouripour replied: “People who save people from certain death should not be criminalized, they should be awarded a medal.”
Nouripour, who grew up in Tehran and came to Germany with his family at the age of 13, reported the terrible consequences of his political work for his relatives in Iran. After he made clear statements about the courageous women in Iran last year, he received calls from relatives “who asked me if I could tone it down because they had been threatened because of my work here.” He added: “And not everyone survived.” Mass protests against the government and the Islamic system of rule began in Iran in September 2022.
Nouripour’s opponent Schmagold, who is particularly noticeable as an active delegate at party conferences, emphasized that things look “catastrophic” when it comes to climate and species protection. He called for greater commitment from his party in these areas: “We need a new departure, we need a lot more new greenery.”