For the first time in their party's four-decade history, the German Greens have announced a candidate to run as chancellor. Equally historic is the central role the Greens will play in September's general election. On Monday, the Green Party announced that 40-year-old Annalena Baerbock would be its choice to take over from Angela Merkel after September's election. Ms Baerbock is likely to be the only woman in the race. Once seen as a chaotic bunch of bearded hippies in sandals, the Greens are now likely to enter the next government. With the conservatives in chaos amid rows over their candidate, the Green Party could even end up the largest in the new coalition. That would mean Annalena Baerbock would be Germany's next chancellor. She's already being compared to young female leaders in New Zealand or Finland. Ms Baerbock was born in 1980, the same year that the party was founded. Her parents took her on anti-nuclear demos. She describes her childhood as a mixture of water cannon at protests, and cake at home later - a mix of cosy middle-class radicalism that sums up the Green Party today, and explains its current mass appeal. According to the most recent poll, the Greens have 22% of the vote, second only to Angela Merkel's conservative CDU/CSU bloc. The conservatives have slumped from over 40% in the summer, when Germany was faring relatively well in the pandemic, to 29%. In some polls the conservatives score even less, putting them a mere four or five percentage points ahead of the Greens. The centre-left SPD has been hovering in the mid- to upper-teens for months. All the other parties are stuck around, or just under, the 10% mark. To make matters worse for the CDU/CSU, the appalling poll numbers don't yet take into account the latest row within the conservatives about their own candidate for chancellor. While the conservative alpha males have been busy... |