Federal Chairwoman Ricarda Lang and Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth will do the talking for the Greens. She emphasizes that this result is, one way or another, the second best for the Greens in Bavaria. “We are firmly anchored” in Bavaria, that is the language that the leading Greens have come up with. Top candidate Katharina Schulze also uses this formulation in her first TV statements in the Maximilianeum. Second-best result ever, firmly anchored: Not much more can be said on this election evening, because whether the Greens, with their second-best result in the Free State, will again become the second strongest force in Bavaria, will only become clear later in the evening.
At the beginning of the evening, the election forecasts commissioned by Bayerischer Rundfunk put the Greens one percentage point ahead of the AfD – but the election researchers on ZDF see them just behind. The Greens see a shift to the right in this election result, regardless of their own position. Because the CSU and the Free Voters have not benefited from their populism, says the Green Party state chairwoman Eva Lettenbauer. Rather, the hostility towards the Greens stirred up by the two governing parties “mainly helped the AfD.” For the Greens it is now time to “fight against right-wing populism and this shift to the right”.
Decency and respect are needed now, says Claudia Roth, and if she and the other leading Greens had their way, then decency and respect would now require the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder and his CSU to also talk to the Greens about a coalition. “What nonsense was it to try to define who belongs and who doesn’t belong,” shouts Roth, because Bavaria is not the CSU, and the CSU is not Bavaria. “We are Bavaria,” says Schulze shortly afterwards.
There were black-green coalition talks after the state elections in 2018, when the Greens achieved their best result in Bavaria. At that time it was 17.6 percent, clearly the second strongest force with a whopping six percentage point lead over the Free Voters and a safe 7.4 ahead of the AfD. The absolute majority of the CSU was also broken back then. The Greens had already seen themselves as the new people’s party and had spoken of the “humility” that was now necessary – humility on the part of the CSU.
However, the coalition talks were no longer so successful in 2018, and no one believed that there could be black-green coalition talks again after this election for a long time. CSU boss Markus Söder has so vehemently ruled out the Greens’ participation in government in recent months, including in a three-digit number of beer tent speeches, that even the otherwise quite agile Söder could hardly change direction again so quickly. He and the CSU made the Greens their main opponents in the election campaign, denied them the alleged “Bavarian gene” and repeatedly questioned whether they even belong to Bavaria. FW boss Hubert Aiwanger, another self-proclaimed antipode of the Greens, even indirectly blamed them for the rise of the AfD.
The fact that the Greens had nevertheless given themselves a “government program” for the election campaign was only met with scorn and ridicule by those who were actually in power – and scorn and ridicule were often the least that the Green campaigners noticed, especially in the beer tents outside hit the country. In any case, very few people there wanted to hear the government program and the Greens’ national political issues. Instead, they were held responsible for real or alleged mistakes by the traffic light coalition in the federal government.
The Green campaigners were often booed and whistled because of this and actually had to shout at half the tent. When top candidate Katharina Schulze appeared near Lake Chiemsee, tomatoes, eggs and large stones and small stones were offered for throwing outside the tent – a joke, as it was said afterwards. A few weeks later in Neu-Ulm someone actually threw a stone towards the stage. In purely physical terms, he didn’t hit Schulze and Hartmann.
There was no longer any talk of the big X
Nobody could expect that Hartmann would throw himself off the stage again after this election, as he did in 2018, when he and Robert Habeck were carried on the hands of cheering party friends in the Muffathalle as a stage diver. At the beginning of the year, Hartmann had stated that his election target was “20 percent plus a very, very big X”. And in the surveys last summer, a fifth of those surveyed said they supported the Greens. When Hartmann spoke of the big It didn’t seem out of the question that the Greens could become the second strongest force again; right up to the end they were neck-and-neck in the polls with the Free Voters and the AfD. This race should not be decided for a long time even on election evening.