Annalena Baerbock hopes to somersault to top of German politics

A few years ago, not many people in Germany knew who Annalena Baerbock was. Now, she is the woman being touted as a potential successor to Angela Merkel. 

A trampoline champion in her youth, Baerbock, 40, made history on Monday by being named as the Greens’ first-ever candidate for chancellor, somersaulting her way to the upper echelons of German politics.

But to those who have followed her career, this stunning rise is unsurprising. Baerbock was relatively unknown among the Greens when she and star politician Robert Habeck, 51, were elected co-leaders in 2018. She spent three years wooing fans inside the party and making the rounds of TV talk shows and on Monday that hard work paid off: Baerbock, not Habeck, won the party’s nomination for chancellor.

Baerbock now has to pull off that same trick at the national level. She hopes to learn from her political rival and role model Merkel, who will end her 16 years at the helm in September, after staying afloat in far choppier political waters than the eco candidate has experienced.

Baerbock will be going up against more seasoned political operatives. On the left, there is Olaf Scholz, the 62-year-old Social Democrats nominee and current finance minister, while Armin Laschet, the 60-year-old candidate for the conservative CDU/CSU, runs Germany’s most populous state.

Compared with them — and their parties — Baerbock is a novice. But in her acceptance speech on Monday she turned her lack of government experience into a virtue. “I stand for renewal,” she said. “Others stand for the status quo.”

Her fans inside the party see a strategic opportunity, too. “It’s a crazy advantage for us to put up the younger, energetic woman against all these old white men,” said one Green political adviser.

Baerbock was born in West Germany in 1980, the same year as the Green party itself, and her rise reflects the party’s transformation.

As a child, she joined her parents at the same antiwar and anti-nuclear power protests attended — if not organised — by the early Greens. She became a party member in 2005 after graduating with a masters in law from the London School of Economics. She first worked for the party on its European policy, and calls herself a “passionate European”, a stance that reflects one of the party’s core values.

Arne Jungjohann, an analyst at the Green-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation, describes three phases of the Greens’ development. They started as a protest party, then moved on to being what he calls a “project party”, willing to join governments at the state or national level to promote certain ideas. Now, they want to take the reins of government themselves.

“The Greens became much more pragmatic,” he said. And Baerbock symbolises that shift. She has often described wanting to be “radical in the matter at hand” while maintaining a “state-supporting attitude”.

Habeck and Baerbock are both representatives of the Greens’ moderate — or “realo” — wing, which has traditionally been less squeamish than the purists — the “fundis” — about acquiring political power. Now they aim to challenge the SPD and CDU’s historic dominance of government.

That tack seems to work: Forsa polls put them at 21 per cent, just 4 points behind Merkel’s CDU/CSU bloc, which is plagued by a corruption scandal and public frustration with the government’s handling of the pandemic. The Greens, open to working with any party but the far-right Alternative for Germany, have far more options than their rivals: they could form a coalition with the CDU/CSU, or with the SPD and the pro-business Free Democrats, or with the SPD and the leftwing Linke party. Though difficult, a Green path to the chancellery is possible.

“The Greens were always marked by internal arguments and confrontation. Now you see a discipline and sense of unity that up to now we’ve only associated with the CDU/CSU,” said Andrea Römmele, from the Hertie School of Government.

Conservatives believe Baerbock’s rivals will get tougher as the campaign goes on, however. They will question how well she would be able to co-operate with Emmanuel Macron, and whether she could hold her own against Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The idea a Green would kowtow to authoritarian regimes is laughable, considering how far the CDU and SPD have gone to appease China and Russia in the name of market access and natural gas deals, allies say. “How could she be softer than them?” one party official said.

Baerbock’s critics also compare her unfavourably with Habeck, a politician, they argue, who has a more human touch. When Germany unveiled its plans to phase out coal, he gained plaudits for meeting miners in the eastern region of Lausitz and expressing sympathy for their plight.

“Habeck shows you the big picture,” said Uwe Jun, a political scientist at Trier University. “[Baerbock] wants to dig deep, to know the details . . . She is the one going over the 13th pollution regulation point for lorries on the Autobahn, or what have you.”

The Greens acknowledge Baerbock is wonky — but her mastery of detail is what many of them like. Some counter that Habeck had the equally problematic flaw of making frequent public gaffes.

However, Baerbock’s biggest challenge, allies fear, is likely to be the same one the Greens have faced in all recent national elections: seeing their numbers soar ahead of the vote, only to plummet on election day.

“Inside the party, we have this saying: With Annalena, you’ll get 18-22 per cent. With Robert, you’ll get 15-25 per cent,” said the Green political adviser. “It’s true you could reach higher with Habeck, but you always have a risk. Annalena is always working, always prepared, she always knows what to do.”