Germany’s Greens are heading for a setback in Sunday’s election in the city-state of Bremen, with voters expected to punish them over concerns their climate policies will place an excessive burden on households.
Accusations of nepotism swirling around a deputy economy minister and close ally of Greens Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck are also seen damaging the party, currently a junior coalition partner in the Bremen government with the Social Democrats and Left party.
A poll by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen for public broadcaster ZDF published Thursday showed support for the Greens has dropped to 13% compared with the 17% they scored in the most recent vote in the north-western German city on the River Weser in 2019.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD has climbed to 29% from 25%, putting Andreas Bovenschulte, the popular city mayor, on course to retain his job, while the main opposition conservative CDU has slipped one percentage point to 26%. Initial exit-poll results are due to be published at 6 p.m. local time.
Local issues often play a decisive role in regional elections, but the Greens’ struggles at the national level are also feeding into the latest vote in Bremen — the smallest of Germany’s 16 states with around 680,000 inhabitants.
While they broadly agree that there is an urgent need to tackle global warming, many citizens are worried they’ll be forced to shoulder too much of the burden.
A Forsa survey for RTL/ntv published this week showed that almost 80% of those polled don’t think the national government’s climate-protection measures sufficiently take into account their financial situation.
“As a result, trust in the top political personnel of the Greens is generally not all that great,” Forsa founder Manfred Guellner said.
Scholz’s SPD and the business-friendly FDP — the other two parties in the ruling coalition in Berlin — have also lost support nationally since the 2021 election. Some recent polls even show the Greens slipping behind the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
The anti—immigrant party — which won 6% of the vote in Bremen in 2019 — has been disqualified from Sunday’s election. Because of internal squabbling, it was unable to come up with a unified list of candidates and submitted two competing ones, in contravention of electoral rules.
