German Election Scorecard: The bursting of the Greens' Baerbock bubble and the emergence of the CDU's Laschet. But the Greens aren't going away.

• Author: Engelen, Klaus C.

Developments in early summer may hint at the outcome of this year's German federal elections in September.

Delegates to the Green Party conference, most connected digitally over a weekend in mid-June, adopted an election manifesto that calls for fast-tracking the switch to carbon neutrality over the next twenty years and vowing to turn Germany into a "socio-ecological market economy." Annalena Baerbock and her co-leader Robert Habeck were confirmed with 98 percent.

According to Matthew Karnitschnig, the Berlin correspondent of Politico, "All she had to do was look in the camera, wave at the small audience and walk off the stage with a big smile that said 'mission accomplished.' Instead, Annalena Baerbock, Germany's Green candidate for chancellor, dropped an s-bomb. 'Scheisse!' she declared into her still-open microphone after delivering a 45-minute convention speech to party faithful Saturday. Baerbock was apparently aggravated about flubbing a line in her address. ... That beginner's mistake was one of several to plague the fortyyear-old candidate in recent weeks, sowing doubt over whether she's really ready for prime time."

BUBBLE BURSTING

For the Greens, who entered Germany's political arena in 1980, April 19, 2021, was supposed to be a historical day. In a well-orchestrated media coup, the Greens presented their co-leader Baerbock as the party's candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in September's national elections. Baerbock has been a member of the Bundestag since 2013. She convinced her fellow party leader Habeck (51), a former state minister of Schleswig-Holstein for environment and agriculture, to leave her the big job of running for the chancellor position. The two co-leaders of the Greens came into office in 2018 and were able to turn the formerly fragmented party into an effective campaign machine with one big goal: to govern again.

Thanks to their dynamic young candidate for chancellor, the Green party rose in national polls to almost 30 percent and at times overtook Armin Laschet's CDU. During the spring, a Green chancellorship seemed within reach.

As Politico's Karnitschnig reported, Baerbock "couldn't have hoped for a better launch of her campaign. Her face was on cover of Germany's biggest magazines. She was the get on the primetime talk shows that Germans watch obsessively. With the governing Christian Democrats tripping from scandal to screw-up and back again, the Greens looked like the adults in the room. In some polls, the Greens even surpassed the long-dominant Christian Democrats, triggering speculation that Baerbock might even succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. It didn't take long for...