The Greens in Bavaria knew the public mood was turning hostile. But they never expected anyone to start throwing stones at them.
At an event last month in Neu-Ulm, one nearly hit Katharina Schulze, the Greens’ top candidate. For her, it was the nadir of an election campaign in the southern German state that has seen Green activists routinely spat on, insulted and threatened.
“The problem is that our political rivals are adding fuel to the fire, and that is stoking this negative atmosphere,” she said.
Bavaria and the neighbouring state of Hesse go to the polls on Sunday in elections that are being seen as a referendum on chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. All three parties in his coalition — the 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 who are turning into the German public’s favourite whipping boy. And they have the scars to prove it.
Hecklers call them “forest-destroyers” for supporting wind farms and “warmongers” for backing Ukraine. At one Green event last month in Hart, in south-eastern Bavaria, a man handed out tomatoes, eggs and stones to hurl at the speakers.
Attendees had asked for particularly heavy stones, and eggs that were rotten, he told German media. “It’s just a joke,” he added.
Hubert Aiwanger, leader of the rightwing Free Voters, says this is just typical of Bavaria’s rough-and-tumble, beer-tent politics. “Northern Germany is just more prim and proper than Bavaria,” he said. “If you want to score points in a beer tent you can’t give a reading like in an upper school for girls.”
Anyway, Aiwanger adds, the Greens have only themselves to blame for the animosity. It was the Green-controlled economy ministry in Berlin, after all, that pushed through a highly unpopular law this year to phase out gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps.
“Even half of Green voters were against [it] and the government passed it anyway,” he said.
But Schulze said hostility to the Greens has also been fuelled by a “targeted campaign of disinformation”, particularly about the boiler law. Markus Söder, the state’s prime minister, claimed a new heat pump cost an eye-watering €300,000: in fact it’s €11,000-€25,000.
Indeed Söder, leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), has made Green-bashing the leitmotif of his campaign. A politician who once flirted with the eco-party now accuses it of lacking a “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 lifetime of Germany’s last three nuclear power stations in the middle of an energy crisis, and denounced the heat pump law as “interference in people’s property rights”.
“The Greens make policies with a crowbar,” said Martin Huber, CSU general secretary. “They are so ideological that they don’t care if society accepts what they’re proposing.”
Söder’s strategy reflects a shift in German politics. State elections were traditionally centred on regional issues — such as education, policing and transport. But since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the cost of living crisis it triggered, that is changing.
“More than ever, voters are using regional elections to pass judgment on the federal government,” said Stefan Kornelius, political editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich-based newspaper. Söder has seized on that as an opportunity. “It allows him to cast himself as a leader of the opposition, against Berlin.”
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Bavaria’s leader. During the summer his coalition partners, the Free Voters, became mired in controversy when the Süddeutsche revealed that Hubert Aiwanger had, as a schoolboy, been found in possession of an antisemitic pamphlet.
Aiwanger, who is also Bavaria’s deputy prime minister, accused the media of a “smear campaign”. But Söder came under massive pressure to sack him. In the end, though, he opted to keep him on, insisted he would continue his alliance with the Free Voters after the election and ruled out any tie-up with the Greens.
Schulze said the Aiwanger affair was emblematic of a “shift to the right” in Bavaria, where the three main rightwing and centre-right parties — the CSU, FW and Alternative for Germany — are together polling at 66 per cent.
There is no doubt, however, that the CSU’s rhetorical fusillades against the Greens — its unfounded claims that they want to force Germans to go vegan and use gender-neutral language — are falling on fertile ground.
In Kloster Andechs, Söder earned peals of laughter when he made fun of Green foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and her recent trip to Mongolia.
“She marched through the Mongolian steppe, found a yurt . . . and told the lady of the house who was busy with her kids and her herd and other stuff all about her feminist foreign policy in Berlin,” he said. Germany’s leaders, he said, should “defend German interests” rather than “try to convert the world”.
The crowd in Kloster Andechs cheered Söder to the rafters. Anni, a 55-year-old local munching on a pretzel, said she was with him on the heating law. “My parents’ house has an oil-fired boiler — will I have to rip that out now?” she asked. “Complying with the law will cost me a fortune.”
The Greens admit they face an uphill battle in Bavaria. They are currently at 15 per cent in the polls, down from 17.6 per cent in the last state elections in 2018. The CSU is meanwhile on 36 per cent.
But Katharina Schulze notes that before 2018 the Greens were stuck at around 5-9 per cent and have polled as high as at 20 per cent in recent years. “We still have a strong base in Bavaria,” she said. “The best is yet to come.”
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