Shocking Revelations: German Parties Face Fierce Battle Against the Greens in Bavaria… Must-Watch!

The Greens in Bavaria knew that the public mood was turning hostile. But they never expected anyone to start throwing stones at them.

Last month, during an event in Neu-Ulm, Katharina Schulze, the main candidate of the Greens, was almost shot. For her, it was the low point of an election campaign in the southern German state that has seen green activists routinely spit, insult and threaten.

“The problem is that our political rivals are adding fuel to the fire, and this is fueling this negative atmosphere,” he said.

Bavaria and the neighboring state of Hesse will go to the polls on Sunday in elections that are seen as a referendum on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. All three parties in his coalition – Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals – have slumped in the polls in recent months as voters blame them for recession, inflation and high energy costs.

But as the Bavarian campaign has shown, it is the Greens themselves who are turning into the German public’s favorite scapegoat. And they have the scars to prove it.

Hecklers call them “forest destroyers” for supporting wind farms and “warmongers” for supporting Ukraine. At a Green event last month in Hart, southeastern Bavaria, a man handed out tomatoes, eggs and rocks to throw at speakers.

Participants had asked for particularly heavy stones and rotten eggs, he told German media. “It’s just a joke,” she added.

Hubert Aiwanger, leader of the right-wing Free Voters, says this is typical of Bavaria’s rough and tumble politics. “Northern Germany is simply more primitive and correct than Bavaria,” he said. “If you want to score points in a beer tent you can’t give a reading like in a girls’ high school.”

In any case, Aiwanger adds, the Greens have only themselves to blame for this animosity. After all, it was Berlin’s Green-controlled Ministry of Economy that pushed through a highly unpopular law this year to phase out gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps.

“Half of Green voters were also against it [it] and the government approved it anyway,” he said.

But Schulze said hostility towards the Greens was also fueled by a “targeted disinformation campaign”, particularly on the boiler law. Markus Söder, the region’s prime minister, said that a new heat pump cost a staggering 300,000 euros – in reality it was 11,000-25,000 euros.

Indeed, Söder, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), has made the attack on the Greens the leitmotif of his campaign. A politician who once flirted with the eco-party now accuses him of lacking the “Bavarian gene”.

At an event in Kloster Andechs, outside Munich, last week, Söder accused the Greens of “ideological double standards” for refusing to extend the life of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants amid an energy crisis, and denounced the law on heat pumps as “interference with people’s property rights”.

“The Greens play politics with a crowbar,” said Martin Huber, general secretary of the CSU. “They are so ideological that they don’t care if society accepts what they propose.”

Söder’s strategy reflects a change in German politics. State elections have traditionally focused on regional issues, such as education, policing and transportation. But since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis it triggered, things are changing.

“More than ever, voters are using regional elections to make a judgment on the federal government,” said Stefan Kornelius, political editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich-based newspaper. Söder seized this opportunity. “It allows him to present himself as the leader of the opposition, against Berlin.”

But not everything went smoothly for the leader of Bavaria. During the summer his coalition partners, the Free Voters, were embroiled in controversy when the Süddeutsche revealed that Hubert Aiwanger, as a schoolboy, had been found in possession of an anti-Semitic pamphlet.

Aiwanger, who is also Bavaria’s deputy prime minister, accused the media of a “smear campaign”. But Söder came under intense pressure to fire him. In the end, however, he decided to stick with it, insisted that he would continue his alliance with the Free Voters after the election and ruled out any links with the Greens.

Schulze said the Aiwanger case was emblematic of a “rightward shift” in Bavaria, where the three main right- and center-right parties – CSU, FW and Alternative for Germany – together account for 66%.

There is no doubt, however, that the CSU’s rhetorical volleys against the Greens – its baseless claims that they want to force Germans to go vegan and use gender-neutral language – are falling on fertile ground.

In Kloster Andechs Söder got a laugh when he poked fun at Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and her recent trip to Mongolia.

“He marched across the Mongolian steppe and found a yurt. . . and told the landlady that she was busy with her children, her herd and other things, all about her feminist foreign policy in Berlin,” he said. German leaders, he said, should “defend German interests” rather than “trying to convert the world”.

The crowd in Kloster Andechs cheered Söder up to the rafters. Anni, a 55-year-old local munching on a pretzel, said she was with him on the heat law. “My parents’ house has an oil boiler: will I have to remove it now?” she asked. “It will cost me a fortune to comply with the law.”

The Greens admit that the battle in Bavaria will be tough. They are currently at 15% in the polls, down from 17.6% in the last state elections in 2018. The CSU is at 36%.

But Katharina Schulze notes that before 2018 the Greens were stuck around 5-9% and in recent years they have reached 20%. “We still have a strong base in Bavaria,” she said. “The best is yet to come.”