For the Greens, there is good news and bad news after the Lilliputian uprising of the left-wing party against the ministerial plans of the ultra-area Cem Özdemir.

The bad: the old wing warfare was back.

The good: It was short, and it's not even clear whether it was really a wing war.

When the gun smoke cleared after a day of hedge firing on Thursday evening, the rebels stood there and had achieved nothing.

Özdemir was and remained a minister-to-be, even if he now has to head the agricultural department, which he absolutely did not want.

The impression remains that a banal intrigue has disguised itself as a wing fight.

This is already evident from the fact that the left wing of the Greens has taken up the traffic light coalition agreement with astonishing calmness.

Konrad Schuller

Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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The top of the Green Youth, which sees itself as rebellious and then it is not always, has recommended that its members approve the contract.

The base “on the street” is also not in the process of putting the battering rams in position for the storming of the green headquarters on Berliner Platz in front of the Neuer Tor.

Fridays for Future is particularly dissatisfied with the climate chapters of the coalition agreement.

In the tweets of the movement, the traffic light is already operating as the #KlimakrisenKoalition.

But Luisa Neubauer, the most famous German activist on the scene, also thinks that - despite all the shortcomings - the coalition agreement “fought for the unimaginable”.

Can such intrigues be avoided in the future?

For the Greens, it will now depend on whether it will be possible to avoid episodes like the Özdemir intrigue in the future. Because they have indeed won a few decisive bastions in the new federal government in the fight against climate change, their most important goal. Because Robert Habeck is going to be Minister of the Environment and Economics at the same time, and because Özdemir is taking over the agriculture department, they can keep an eye on some of the most climate-damaging sectors in the country: steel, cement, energy, agriculture.

You have the problem, however, that the coalition agreement does set goals on a number of crucial points, but does not yet provide any concrete measures. This applies to the eighty percent of electricity generation that is to become sustainable by 2030, this applies to traffic, which, with the planned CO2 price of 60 euros per ton, will certainly not become climate-neutral as quickly as would be necessary to achieve the 1, Achieve 5 degree goal. The fact that the traffic light partners did not agree on a higher price is due to their fear of public anger, because a higher price for carbon dioxide means more expensive gasoline and more expensive heating oil.

If what is necessary for the climate is to be done here, the FDP and SPD in particular must fear the anger of their voters. How exactly Olaf Scholz observes their mood has been shown in the last legislative period. At that time, he blocked the first attempts by Environment Minister Svenja Schulze to introduce a CO2 price. When the tabloids impaled the subject and painted a “tax hammer” on the wall, the finance department said stop.

The matter is made even more difficult by the fact that the Greens have not been able to wrest their traffic light partners the kind of control over climate policy that they would have liked. Before the coalition agreement was signed, some of them had hoped that Habeck's future super ministry for climate and economy would, like the finance department, get the right to subject every bill from every other house to a "climate check" before it was brought into the cabinet. Some had described this desired privilege as a preferred right of veto.

Now the climate check is coming, but it is no longer the responsibility of a green super-ministry; every house is required to carry it out itself. The only option left for the Greens to intervene is the general clause in the contract, according to which no partner should overrule the other. But that is something else than intended. There is no longer any prior checking of laws, only the possibility of exercising a veto in the cabinet. Such a veto is one of the most difficult weapons imaginable in coalition conflicts. Maybe not the atomic bomb, but Fat Berta.

That is why the Greens will need all the unity in the world to assert themselves in the fight for the 1.5-degree target.

Only those who have some troops behind them can win such a fight.

Otherwise, the saying of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which was recently quoted repeatedly at the climate conference in Glasgow, applies: "A goal without a plan is just a wish."