The evening sun shines mildly from the blue Berlin sky, a mild breeze is blowing, Riesling from the Rheingau and Pils from Central Hesse lift the spirits.

More than a thousand guests followed the invitation of the Hessian State Representation to their garden near Potsdamer Platz.

But much more important than the summer hustle and bustle outdoors is the secret meeting that took place shortly before behind closed doors in the neighboring residence of the state of Schleswig-Holstein.

Ewald Hetrodt

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung in Wiesbaden.

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A total of about a dozen members of the Hessian state parliamentary groups of the Greens and FDP have come together to loosen up the considerably disturbed relationship between the two sides.

For example, a derailment of the deputy Frank Kaufmann (Die Grünen) to the parliamentarian Marion Schardt-Sauer (FDP) was discussed.

In view of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, she wanted to see the contracts for the participation of the Hessian Fraport at the airport in Saint Petersburg.

Kaufmann called it “a bit silly”.

Because what she has shown in terms of expertise so far does not indicate that she is able to "read such contracts sensibly".

In vain did the FDP demand an apology from the seventy-four-year-old.

The process is symptomatic of the relationship between the two parties.

For many years it was tense, sometimes downright poisoned.

Therefore, hardly anyone was surprised when parliamentary group leader René Rock, top candidate of the FDP, announced before the state elections in 2018 that the Liberals would not vote for a Prime Minister of the Greens after the election.

Just because they kept their word, the Greens, SPD and FDP didn't come together in Wiesbaden, which mathematically had the necessary majority to elect Tarek Al-Wazir as head of government.

The former Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) never thanked the Liberals for this, according to the FDP today.

But relations with the Greens continued to deteriorate.

This was shown, for example, by Al-Wazir's reaction to criticism from the FDP shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic.

At first he mocked the fact that the Liberals had been working on him for years in vain.

He found the motion to “end the political quarantine of the Minister of Economics” so indecent that he took it as an opportunity to deny the FDP MPs the attribute of being civil.

"Citizenship means that you don't have to think about it for long, but rather have a certain basic sense of what to do and what not to do," explained the Green politician to the FDP parliamentarians: "Just think about it. ’ In the plenum, the instruction on the fundamentals of liberalism went unanswered.

The bitterness lasted all the longer in the group.

Against this background, the purpose of the Berlin meeting, which was supposed to remain confidential, becomes clear.

"For us Greens, it's important to have good contact with all the parliamentary groups apart from the AfD," says Mathias Wagner, the parliamentary group leader of the Greens: "After all, it doesn't make sense to only talk to each other when a possible election result forces you to do so."