The leaders of Germany's Greens are quitting after several election defeats

BERLIN — The leaders of Germany's Greens, one of three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's troubled coalition government, announced Wednesday that they will step down after the latest in a string of disappointing election results.

The environmentalist party's support declined sharply in the European Parliament election in June. This month, it fared poorly in three state elections in eastern Germany. Voters ejected it from two state legislatures, most recently in Brandenburg on Sunday.

Co-leader Omid Nouripour said in a hastily arranged statement to reporters that the result in Brandenburg “is evidence of our party’s deepest crisis for a decade.”

“It is necessary and it is possible to overcome this crisis,” he said. The party leadership has decided that “a new beginning is needed” and “it is time to put the destiny of this great party in new hands,” he added.

Nouripour and the party's other co-leader, Ricarda Lang, took the helm of the party in early 2022 after predecessors Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock joined Scholz's government as vice chancellor and foreign minister respectively.

The party has seen its popularity decline since, along with that of its coalition partners. The mainstream conservative opposition Union bloc leads national polls ahead of a national election expected next year, while the far-right Alternative for Germany is polling strongly.

The national government — an uneasy combination of Scholz's center-left Social Democrats with the Greens, who also lean left, and the pro-business Free Democrats — has angered Germans by bickering at length over poorly explained projects that sometimes raise fears of new costs.

Those included a plan drawn up by Habeck's economy and climate ministry to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with greener alternatives. There have been frequent tensions between the Greens, who were strong advocates of Germany's exit from nuclear power and have a relatively liberal approach to migration, and the Free Democrats, who saw their own support reduced to microscopic levels in this month's state elections. Meanwhile, Germany's economy is struggling to generate any growth.

The plan is for new party leaders to be elected at a previously scheduled party congress in mid-November, Nouripour said.

“New faces are needed to lead this party out of this crisis,” Lang said. “You can imagine that this decision isn't easy, but we are taking it out of conviction.”

Neither Nouripour nor Lang are part of Scholz's Cabinet. Their decision does not affect the Greens' five Cabinet ministers.

In the European Parliament election, the Greens slumped to 11.9% of the vote from an exceptionally successful 20.5% five years earlier, losing ground among young voters in particular. In Germany's last national election in 2021, when Baerbock made the party's first run for the chancellery, the party won 14.8%.

Baerbock said in July that she wouldn't make another bid for Germany's top job in the next election, scheduled for September 2025. The party hasn't yet decided whether it will put up a candidate for chancellor again, though Habeck is widely believed to be keen to run.

Habeck told German news agency dpa that the leaders' resignation is “a great service to the party” and “they are clearing the way for a strong new beginning.”