Both like to laugh.

Omid Nouripour has it deep in his throat, his whole body trembles, he lifts his chin and falls back in his chair.

Ricarda Lang just keeps talking in a fit of laughter, chuckling between the words.

Conversations with both have a high entertainment value.

They also like the shallow silliness.

In a YouTube video, Nouripour wants to win the moderator for his Eintracht Frankfurt fan club in the Bundestag and asks him if he has anything to do with the "bubble", "well, you know, not with peeing, ho, ho," he means the political bubble.

Helen Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Ricarda Lang sits on the show "Disslike" and comments on nasty comments that reach her via social media.

"Can't even pull her lipstick" is definitely one of the nicer ones.

"Unfortunately that's true," Lang giggles, "I really can't do that."

The two are said to be on the phone at least five times a day.

They probably joke sometimes too.

Lang, the previous deputy chairwoman, and Nouripour, most recently foreign policy spokesman for the parliamentary group in the Bundestag, want to be elected as the new party leaders of the Greens this Saturday.

The Left Party and Realo replace Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck, but their job will be different.

"Dream team" in the spotlight is not the role that the outgoing board thought up for his successors.

The fact that Nouripour told the "Handelsblatt" that it was wrong to believe that "one can follow in the footsteps of predecessors and fill them in" met with approval.

The new chairmen should not compete with Habeck and Baerbock, they should let the ministers shine.

It is certainly helpful to approach this task with a dose of self-mockery.

The Greens, who were already politically active in 1998, remember how difficult it was to get into government business back then. German participation in the Afghanistan mission and later approval of the Hartz reforms led to serious upheavals in the party. A bag of paint hit Joschka Fischer, then Foreign Minister, and thousands of members declared their resignation. Nouripour and Lang should ensure that history does not repeat itself. In interviews, you yourself have described your role as that of a “hinge”: the party chairmanship as the link between ministers and the party base, as well as movements close to the Greens, such as Fridays for Future.

The classification of nuclear power as a sustainable energy source under the EU taxonomy gives a first taste of what Lang and Nouripour can expect.

You must explain and defend such compromises in the future.

This is not an enviable task for a party with an “idealistic surplus”, as Habeck recently called it.

When the Greens voted in October to start coalition negotiations with the SPD and FDP, Habeck tried to get his party in the mood for the new role: it would be a "stair joke of history" if the Greens, who wanted to expect so much from society, are not prepared to expect anything from themselves.

The fact that party members nodded does not mean that they will not shake their heads violently if the FDP prevails again.