Greens poised to take over Germany

Bloomberg

When Gerhard Schroeder formed a German government with the Greens in 1998, he made it clear that his Social Democratic Party was the “cook” and the junior partner the “waiter.” Well, not any more.
Polls show the Greens with all the momentum going into September’s election and the odds-on favourites for a return to coalition government. What’s more, they’re on the up just as the other main parties fade, giving Annalena Baerbock a realistic shot at capturing the chancellery for the Greens for the first time in history.
“I stand for renewal,” Baerbock, 40, said in Berlin as her candidacy was announced. “Others represent the status quo.”
If Germany is on the verge of delivering such a shock, it’s come about through a combination of circumstances. The first is that Angela Merkel is standing down—16 years after beating Schroeder—and, for someone who became the epitome of stability, she leaves in her wake a sea of electoral unpredictability.
The truth is that after so long calling the shots, her Christian Democratic Union, the party of Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, has an air of exhaustion. So does its Social Democratic partner, with whom Merkel will have governed for 12 of those 16 years. Polls show Merkel’s conservative bloc of the CDU and its CSU Bavarian sister party floundering under her would-be successor, Armin Laschet, with the Social Democrats a distant third.
Until now, the Greens’ biggest achievement was serving as junior partner
in the Schroeder government’s two terms.