# Germany’s Greens resign leadership after heavy state election losses
Germany’s Green Party has entered a period of open reckoning after co-leaders Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour announced they will resign following a run of election defeats.
The Guardian reported that the pair, who have led the party together since 2022, said the Greens needed a radical reset after the result of the Brandenburg state election and earlier setbacks in Thuringia, Saxony and the European Parliament vote. Their announcement comes as the party faces what Lang described as its deepest crisis in a decade.
The resignations do not remove the Greens from Germany’s federal government, where Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock remain the party’s leading cabinet figures. But the leadership shake-up does underline how badly the party has been hit by shifting voter alignments. Support for the far-right AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance has squeezed the Greens in eastern Germany and intensified a sense that the party has lost its political momentum.
Nouripour said it was time to hand the party’s fate to others. Lang framed the decision in broader terms, arguing that the crisis raised a question about what kind of country Germany wants to be and whether the government will keep pursuing climate neutrality or retreat from it. That is a familiar tension for the Greens, whose identity has long been tied to environmental policy but whose time in government has forced them to compromise on issues shaped by war, energy security and coalition politics.
The article says the party has also been criticized for appearing out of touch with ordinary voters, especially on day-to-day concerns such as heating, transport and costs. In campaign after campaign, opponents have portrayed the Greens as overly prescriptive. That message appears to have landed in some voter groups, especially younger Germans, where the party suffered a steep decline in Brandenburg.
The broader political backdrop is difficult for all of Germany’s governing parties. Poll ratings for the three-way coalition are at a record low, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz is described as the least popular chancellor in modern German history. The Greens’ internal reset therefore comes not only in response to one bad election but amid a wider crisis of confidence in the governing project itself.
Lang and Nouripour will remain in their posts until the party conference in November, when delegates in Wiesbaden are expected to choose new leaders. In the meantime, the resignations open the door to a debate about whether the Greens should sharpen their environmental message, soften their public image or simply accept that the political terrain has changed around them.
For now, the message is clear: Germany’s Greens are no longer treating poor results as a temporary dip. They are treating them as proof that the party’s current leadership line has run out of road.
