Dhe Green Party’s criticism of the allegations against Robert Habeck and his State Secretary Patrick Graichen sometimes sounds so self-pitying that one might think that the Green-alternative outsider who is being suppressed by the establishment is still speaking. Ironically, a Green politician like Jürgen Trittin, a master of the campaign, complains that it is a campaign. The Greens should know that a campaign says nothing about whether its purpose is legitimate or not. Campaigns, no matter how nasty, have gotten them to where they are, at the controls of power.
Habeck and Graichen now have to face up to the standards that their party likes to apply to their supposedly sinful competition, but which they would like to apply only to a limited extent to themselves because they are blameless. In green ministries, whether in Rhineland-Palatinate or in Berlin, the principle applies all too often: green ends justify green means.
No state secretary from another party could have afforded to make his friend and best man the manager of a federal agency without causing a scandal and personal consequences. But the Greens? Habeck had the decision annulled – case closed? After all, he did not follow the line of Trittin, who was anything but a good advisor for Annalena Baerbock in the federal election campaign. The minister openly admits the mistake. Will disciplinary proceedings now follow?
Habeck has not regained trust as a result. It is unbelievable that the minister should have known nothing at all about the personnel involved. It is also unbelievable that, in view of nepotism, green politics should be much more than the performance of yes-men in bureaucracy and science. The most recent result is legislation that has absurd side effects before it is even passed. The traffic light sees this as a catch-up race after years of the “Altmaier kink”. Another campaign by the Greens. A bad one at that.
