Franziska Brantner makes an election campaign visit to the young company Polysecure in the Freiburg district of St. Georgen.
The managing directors have set up a red, a green and a yellow watering can in front of the test laboratories.
The politician is supposed to arrange the jugs in the way that the Bundestag election result could turn out to be.
The top candidate of the Baden-Württemberg Greens puts the green watering can forward.
And the yellow one quickly to the side.
Rudiger Soldt
Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.
Follow I follow
Brantner is running for constituency 274 in Heidelberg. On this day she is accompanied by Chantal Kopf, the Freiburg candidate for constituency 281. Both are given certain chances of winning the direct mandate. Chantal Kopf has good prospects; four years ago, her predecessor, Kerstin Andreae, was just 2.3 percentage points behind the CDU candidate. It doesn't look so good for Brantner. The long-standing top dog of the CDU in Heidelberg, Karl Lamers, no longer competes, but has built up his successor Alexander Föhr for years.
Brantner makes a first vote election campaign for the first time.
In the Polysecure laboratories in Freiburg, the employees show their visitors how differently used plastics can be labeled with fluorescent substances before recycling, so that plastic for yoghurt pots is not accidentally extracted from an old oil bottle.
“We need political support for this.
Without a regulatory policy, no manufacturer identifies the types of plastic, ”says Peter Hensle, the company's head of marketing.
Brantner agrees: “This is very important for the circular economy.
If we don't manage to recycle raw materials, we won't get the Green Deal done.
Not even with the battery cells in e-cars. "
The main opponents are usually the Social Democrats
Unlike in other federal states, the fight for direct mandates for green Bundestag candidates in the southwest is a dedicated fight against competition from the CDU. Brantner visits many companies to demonstrate business friendliness. “We want to show that the economy is much further than politics,” she says. “Politics” means the main political opponent, the CDU.
Apart from some of the federal electoral districts in rural Bavaria or Lower Saxony, the main opponents of the Greens in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne or Mainz are always the Social Democrats. Only in the east - for example in Leipzig - is it the Left Party. At the beginning of the election campaign, when some media already thought Annalena Baerbock in the Chancellery, things looked a little different. The SPD was the third force, for the Greens the CDU was also the main opponent outside of Baden-Württemberg. At that time, the federal office was expected to have around 60 direct mandates. Baerbock's mistakes and the rise of SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz have dashed these hopes - seven to ten green direct mandates would now count as a great success.
First vote election campaigns are time-consuming and only make sense if the list candidate has worked intensively on his constituency in the previous legislative period.
In many places, the candidates from the SPD and the CDU are better anchored in society than the Greens.
If the top candidates Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock struggle with too many appearances in potentially promising list candidates, this could be at the expense of the second vote result, which is far more important for the Greens.
There is no such thing as a sophisticated strategy
The Greens therefore do not have a sophisticated strategy of winning as many direct mandates as possible. “We don't do battleground campaigns because we absolutely want to win a constituency directly. But we support everyone who does a direct election campaign, and we have also done training for them, "it says in the Berlin party headquarters. Directly won mandates are always good for “growing into the area”. The directly elected member of the Bundestag is allowed to sit a little further ahead than the list candidate when a university building is opened.