Thursday, August 5, 2021

Saarland Greens Carved 'Off'

 Because of games that the national level of the Green Party played in the Saarland (the state itself)....the state authority on putting the Greens on the national election ballot for the federal election in September...decided about ten days ago that things weren't meeting the regulation, so they excluded the party from the ballot.

Well....the national Greens and the bulk of the regional Greens....got peeved and took this to court.  Today....court said 'yeah', the regulations say 'X', and you failed on the measures required.

What this 'game' was all about?  The Greens made up a national mandate that either you run a regional state campaign with a female in charge, or you run a two person (male AND female) situation.  Greens held meetings and eventually in the state ballot measure.....it was one single guy as the state Green figure.  National Greens slammed the decision and forced up another candidate measure.  State authorities said that kinda violated the intent of the first vote.  

You can laugh about this, but what it does in the regional state of the Saarland....there are approximately 25k to 35k potential Green voters, so they can't vote for the Green Party.  Logical direction?  Probably a SPD trend, a Linke trend, or voting for some minor 2nd level party.  

Hurting the national vote?  The national Greens sitting in Berlin will curse this whole event and the loss of 30k votes in national balloting.  If they come fairly close to beating the CDU and miss it by 30k votes....this will be talked about for years how they screwed up.  

So to the discussion....are the national Greens out of touch with state-level Greens?  Some folks have talked about this in Baden-Wurttemberg.  A fair number of the national Greens that you see on TV....have never done time at the city or state level.  So you'd suggest various experiences that they should have gone through....aren't there and maybe they are lacking in certain key campaign/leadership skills.   

No comments: