Green party’s Robert Habeck to run for German chancellor

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Robert Habeck, Germany’s deputy chancellor and economy minister, will announce on Friday that he is running as the Green party’s candidate for chancellor in next year’s snap election, party officials said.

The move came as the German political system was still reeling from the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government on Wednesday and the prospect of early elections in March.

Scholz brought the curtain down on his fragile three-party coalition by sacking finance minister Christian Lindner, leader of the smallest party in the alliance, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).

With the FDP pulling its ministers out of the cabinet, Scholz now heads a minority government of Social Democrats and Greens. He has said he will table a confidence vote on January 15, which he will lose. That will pave the way for snap elections next March.

But the opposition is insisting that Scholz hold the vote as early as next week, warning that Germany cannot afford a long period of political uncertainty.

Habeck has long harboured ambitions for Germany’s top job, but in the last Bundestag election in 2021 he stepped back to allow Annalena Baerbock to run as the Green candidate.

Baerbock then became foreign minister in Scholz’s government. In an interview on CNN in July, she said she would not run again for the top job, opening the way for Habeck to stand.

His candidacy will need to be confirmed at a Green party conference next week in the west German city of Wiesbaden.

However, Habeck’s chances of becoming chancellor are slim. Approval ratings for the Greens have slumped in recent months, with polls now placing them at 9-11 per cent.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, said that Habeck’s plan when the party was polling so badly had “a humorous aspect”.

There had already been some indications that Habeck was gearing up to announce a bid. This week he reappeared on X, six years after abandoning Twitter and Facebook.

“It’s easy to leave these places to the ranters and populists,” he wrote on X “But taking the easy way out can’t be the solution. Not today. Not this week. Not at this time. That’s why I’m back on X.”

Another post on X shows Habeck editing a text, with a calendar in the background showing November 8 marked in red.

Habeck comes from the “realo” or pragmatic wing of the Greens. As deputy chancellor he was often involved in policies that were hard for other Greens to stomach, such as tougher rules on immigration.

He is seen as one of the most gifted orators of his generation. But his reputation was damaged by the controversy surrounding a law pushed through by his ministry, aimed at phasing out gas and oil-fired boilers and replacing them with heat pumps run on renewable energy. Many saw it as an unwarranted intervention in the private sphere.

Habeck has also been partly blamed for Germany’s deteriorating economic prospects. A few weeks ago he downgraded the country’s economic forecast, admitting that it now faces its first two-year recession since the early 2000s.

Habeck’s plans were first reported by Der Spiegel.