Political Story

 It's an odd story to tell.

In each German state (sixteen of them), there is an authority which determines the legit nature of a party, and if they can be placed on the September national election ballot.  

Down in the Saarland.....the authority examined the competent leadership (recent vote) of the Green Party, and the chaos that was invented.  After a review, they said 'no'....you (the Green Party) can't be on the ballot.

At this point, there probably isn't enough time to fix the problems, and when the ballots are printed out....if you live in the Saarland area, you won't have any Green Party candidates to vote for.

I looked at the 2017 election results....4.5 percent of the total vote from the Saarland was for the Green Party.  If you gaze at social media and polling, the Greens had this 'gut-feeling' that this time around in the Saarland, they would have pulled 7 to 8 percent of the state voting.

In simple terms....they are fairly peeved.

A fair amount of this chaos leads back to the national rule by the Greens...your state leadership has to be a male-female duo, or a female.  You can't have a state leadership vote, where a male by himself is 'crowned' state party boss.  You can laugh over the national trend with the Greens, but they have pressed this rule for at least a year.

So from this group of what would have been a Green vote for a Green candidate, and you can't perform that action.....who gets these votes (or do they stay home)?  I would suggest that the Linke Party and SPD Party probably split the votes.  For the Linke, locally, this would amount to them being around 15 percent of the state voting.  For the SPD, it would amount to around 34 percent of the state voting. 

Hindering the national numbers?  This isn't exactly a major population center, and the amount of votes (using the 2017 numbers) wouldn't really say much for the Greens to be denied a chance in this election.

Being a stupid situation to wander into?  No doubt.  The national Green leadership should have kept their mouth shut and just accepted the regional Green developments.  It wouldn't shock me if a quarter to half of the Greens in the Saarland walked off after this election and developed a whole party unto themselves.  The fact that there is a March 2022 state election in the Saarland?  That would really twist things a bit if the party split up.  The Greens back in 2017 for the state election managed only 4 percent of the state vote and were denied seats in the state legislature.  

A curious event which probably gets on page one of political news for this Sunday.