Habeck's withdrawal: receipt for the adjusted election campaign

Robert Habeck's departure from the front row of the Greens is bitter. The party has not had such a talent for speaking for a long time. It is not just a matter of articulating the issue: Habeck has a talent for expressing that opposition can also be a means of mediation, that even in politics it is possible to admit mistakes, and that you don't necessarily have to sound like you are reading out last week's press release. It is the confident tone of a basic liberal consensus that Habeck hits and that is too often missing in public debate.

But voters did not reward communication skills, but rather punished the traffic light coalition as a whole for policies that were widely perceived as inadequate. All three parties had decided to make the most important traffic light faces their top candidates - and were unsuccessful. The withdrawal of all three traffic light men Scholz, Lindner and Habeck is therefore only logical.

The Greens did indeed achieve a relatively high result compared to the SPD and FDP: 11.6 percent is the second best result since their founding. This also represents recognition that it was not the Greens who made the biggest mistake in the traffic light project. It is also possible that some agitated homeowners have long since noticed that heat pumps are not a torture instrument from Habeck personally, but a largely tax-funded heating alternative when gas prices are rising rapidly.

But after an election campaign tailored entirely to Habeck, which aimed to revive the people's party claim of 2021, 11.6 percent is simply too bad. Habeck's program was to win over the Merz-shy Merkel voters - in a black-green spirit, which also prevails in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the voter migration data, this worked at all. Instead, the Greens gave hundreds of thousands of votes to the Union.

But the Left Party has taken the most from the Greens. When Merz tore a hole in the firewall against the AfD in the Bundestag, the Left Party profiled itself as the only resistance force against any future Merz government .

Habeck is right when he says that the Greens did not have this option and therefore lost many " young progressive people ". But the Greens had already seemed at times as if their ability to connect with the Union was their most important characteristic. Green issues and attitudes practically disappeared in the constant protestations of conformity and reason. Merz and Söder thanked the Greens for making themselves so small by attacking them with increasing malice.

In this respect, it was not just the black-green course that damaged the Greens, but also Robert Habeck's tone. If you want to mediate, you need someone to talk to.