How much federal politics is there in a state election?

It depends very much on whether the winner or the loser answers this question.

But then it is predictable: When the SPD triumphed in Saarland, the Social Democrats in the federal government took it for themselves, while the CDU said it was only about state politics.

The opposite was the case in Schleswig-Holstein last week.

Against this background, the reaction of the Greens to the record results in North Rhine-West is interesting.

The party received 18.2 percent of the votes, almost trebling its 2017 result.

It is already clear that the Greens will be involved in the next state government.

Now they see themselves being courted by the CDU and SPD and are not tipping the scales, but rather the porpoise.

Helen Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

It would be easy for the Greens in the federal government to read this result as proof of how well the Green Ministers in Berlin did their job.

Up and down the country there is praise for Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, even Friedrich Merz, the CDU chairman said a "chapeau".

But Ricarda Lang, the federal chairwoman, does not come up trumps, certainly not at the expense of the traffic light partners in Berlin.

On the contrary: In the program "Anne Will" on Sunday evening, she says: "Nobody brought the election campaign into the federal government", so the federal government is not damaged by the election result.

Germany needs a stable government.

"And we still have them in the traffic lights," says Lang.

The Greens know the risk of flying high.

It's not just because they're often followed by a hard landing.

Another scenario is currently more dangerous: that the SPD and FDP could become nervous given the strength of the Greens and be tempted to harm their successful coalition partner.

It is an old hat that coalitions are only stable if the partners can treat each other to something.

That was what the traffic light had decided to do in the fall.

Dream of the social democratic decade burst

Even after the election in Schleswig-Holstein, where the Greens also achieved the best result in the history of the state, Lang was asked by journalists whether that didn't disturb the good relationship with the SPD in the federal government, when the Green ministers already outranked those of the SPD expired?

No, you work together as a trusting team, Lang said last Monday.

And now another week has passed and with it another victory for the Greens and further defeats for the other two partners.

The FDP has achieved poor results in three state elections in a row this year. There were slight gains in Saarland, but it was not enough to get into the state parliament.

In Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, which are actually the home states of the Free Democrats, they lost bitterly.

The dream of a social-democratic decade has burst again, in the north the result was meager and in the west there was ultimately no duel at all.

Things hadn't gone well for the Greens in Saarland, but now it rained green on two Sundays in a row.

This situation in the federal states fits the picture given by the three parties in the federal government.

The chancellor has understood that he needs to explain his policy better, but he doesn't really succeed.

He seems far away - and Baerbock and Habeck fill this gap.

The FPD is particularly noticeable through riots.

Only on Friday did MPs leave the Defense Committee meeting in protest because they were frustrated with the Chancellor's answers.

The defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann had publicly attacked Olaf Scholz several times.

That didn't pay off.

"Every party draws attention to itself differently," says a Green, "the chancellor is going to Kyiv."

who was the first representative of the federal government to travel to the Ukraine, where she found the right words and produced the right pictures.

It would have been the chancellor's job, but he didn't want to go because the federal president had been uninvited.

The Greens have understood that they are currently not allowed to say such sentences so often and not so loudly.

You don't want to provoke the SPD and FDP unnecessarily, because they could take revenge.

The Greens have to be quietly happy these days.