Bavaria’s Greens know public sentiment is turning hostile. But they never expected that someone would start throwing stones at them.
The Green Party’s top candidate, Katharina Schulze, came close to being shot at an event in New Ulm last month. For her, it was the lowest point of the campaign in the southern German state, where Green Party activists regularly spat on her, insulted her and threatened her.
“The problem is that our political opponents are adding fuel to the fire and exacerbating this negative atmosphere,” she said.
Bavaria and neighboring Hesse will go to the polls on Sunday in an election seen as a referendum on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. All three parties in his coalition – the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals – have slipped in polls in recent months as voters blame them for the recession, inflation and high energy costs.
But as the Bavarian election campaign showed, the Greens are becoming the German public’s favorite scapegoat. They have the scars to prove it.
Hecklers called them “forest destroyers” for supporting wind farms and “war mongers” for supporting Ukraine. A man hands out tomatoes, eggs and stones to throw at a loudspeaker at a green event in Hart in southeastern Bavaria last month.
He told German media that attendees requested particularly heavy rocks and rotten eggs. “It was just a joke,” he added.
Hubert Ewanger, leader of the right-wing Free Voters, said this was just typical of Bavaria’s chaotic beer-tent politics. “Northern Germany is more formal and proper than Bavaria,” he said. “If you want to score in the beer tent, you can’t make reads like you would in an all-girls high school.”
In any case, the Greens’ hatred can only be blamed on the Greens themselves, Ewanger added. After all, it was Berlin’s green-controlled Economics Ministry that this year pushed for a deeply unpopular law to phase out gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps.
“Even half of Green voters were against (it), but the government passed it anyway,” he said.
But Schulz said a “targeted disinformation campaign” had also fueled hostility toward the Greens, particularly about boiler laws. The state’s Prime Minister Markus Söder claims that a new heat pump costs up to 300,000 euros: in reality it costs between 11,000 and 25,000 euros.
Indeed, Söder, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), has made green-bashing a theme of his campaign. A politician who once flirted with the Eco Party now accuses the party of lacking “Bavarian DNA”.
At an event in Kloster Andechs outside Munich last week, Söder accused the Greens of an “ideological double standard” in their refusal to extend the lives of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants amid the energy crisis and denounced the heat pump law as “Interfering with people’s property rights.”
“The Greens set policy with a crowbar,” said Martin Huber, secretary-general of the CSU. “Their ideology is so strong that they don’t care whether society accepts their proposals.”
Söder’s strategy reflected a shift in German politics. State elections have traditionally focused on regional issues such as education, policing and transportation. But that’s changing since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis it triggered.
“Voters are using regional elections more than ever to make judgments about the federal government,” said Stefan Cornelius, political editor of the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Söder seized the opportunity. “This allows him to project himself as an opposition leader against Berlin.”
But it’s not all plain sailing for the Bavarian leader. This summer, his coalition partners the Free Voters were embroiled in controversy when the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that Hubert Ewanger had been caught in possession of an anti-Semitic pamphlet when he was a student.
Evanger, who is also Bavaria’s deputy prime minister, accused the media of “smear campaign”. But Souder is under intense pressure to fire him. But ultimately he chose to keep him in office, insisting he would continue to align with Liberal voters after the election and ruling out any collaboration with the Greens.
Schulz said the Avenger incident was emblematic of Bavaria’s “turn to the right”, with the state’s three main right-wing and center-right parties – the CSU, Labor and the Alternative for Germany – polling together at 66% .
There is no doubt, however, that the CSU’s blistering rhetoric against the Greens – with its unfounded claims that the Greens want to force Germans to go vegetarian and use gender-neutral language – is taking hold.
At Andkers Abbey, Soder earned laughs by poking fun at Green Party foreign minister Annalena Berbock and her recent trip to Mongolia.
“She walked across the Mongolian steppes, found a yurt . . . and told the hostess about her feminist foreign policy in Berlin, who was busy taking care of children, cattle and other things,” he said. He said German leaders should “defend Germany’s interests” rather than “try to change the world.”
The crowd at Andkers Abbey cheered for Sword. Anni, a 55-year-old local who munched on a pretzel, said she stood with him on the heating law. “My parents’ house has an oil boiler – do I have to remove it now?” she asked. “Following the law will cost me a fortune.”
The Greens admit they face an uphill battle in Bavaria. They currently stand at 15% in the polls, down from 17.6% at the last state election in 2018. At the same time, the CSU’s support rate was 36%.
But Katharina Schulze pointed out that before 2018, the Green Party’s support rate had been stuck at around 5-9%, with poll support rates as high as 20% in recent years. “We still have a strong base in Bavaria,” she said. “The best is yet to come.”
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