The leaders of Germany’s Greens are quitting after election defeats

BERLIN (AP) — 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 Greens’ support declined sharply in the European Parliament election in June. Voters ejected them from two state parliaments in eastern Germany in regional elections this month, most recently in Brandenburg on Sunday.

Co-leader Omid Nouripour said in a hastily arranged statement to reporters Wednesday 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.”

Nouripour and the party’s other co-leader, Ricarda Lang, took the helm of the party in early 2022 after their 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. 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.

The plan is for new 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’ ministers.