Ex-Green Party leader at Miosga: The new Ricarda Lang – a burden has been lifted from her

You have to imagine Ricarda Lang as a woman who has gotten rid of a heavy burden. “I was able to throw my scissors into the corner. “It’s a liberating feeling,” Lang said on Sunday evening.

The scissors – by this Lang meant his own fear of too clear language, and a little bit of the ruthless truth. “As a party leader, you sit on a talk show like this and always have the question in your head: Which 30-second snippet will end up on the internet?” she reported on Caren Miosga’s ARD show. Lang has no longer been party leader of the Green Party since November 16, having resigned after several disappointing state elections. And since then, the 30-year-old has been giving insights into the inner life of top politicians.

Rarely has a politician been so self-critical of Miosga – and so shortly after her resignation, for which there was no direct misconduct as the reason. It became clear: Lang considered much of how she appeared as chairwoman to be wrong – and couldn’t find her way out of her role. She commented on a short clip in which she defended a lukewarm compromise on motorway expansion after a coalition committee meeting with plain language: “If you see it like that now, then of course you are ashamed.” She explained: “Then you start to think crap Selling gold and talking nonsense like the one I said.”

Lang said that top politicians are constantly afraid that their words could be scandalized. However, this leads to a loss of trust. “People have the feeling that they are hiding something from me,” said the career politician. The voters would then think: If the politicians “despise me or make fun of me” anyway, they could also vote for the extremes. “We have to start treating people more like adults again and have the courage to do so.” Because, she mused, what would actually have happened if she had spoken differently, more clearly and thus broken the unwritten rules of the game? Her guess in retrospect: Maybe there would have been a few nasty calls – but that would have been it.

Lang agreed with her two fellow discussants, the former SPD candidate for chancellor and finance minister Peer Steinbrück and the deputy WELT editor-in-chief Robin Alexander: Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not taking this more honest path either. The SPD politician led the traffic light coalition into the mistake of not drawing any further conclusions from the “turning point” he had proclaimed. During the election campaign, he is now stoking fears of a Russian attack – just to position himself as a prudent solution. This is wrong in terms of foreign policy, irresponsible in terms of domestic policy and will lead to the Russia-friendly alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) gaining votes, ranted Lang.

The group was similarly critical of the Union of Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. Its election program creates a financing gap of 100 billion euros. That was “spoofing voters,” Lang complained.

Political observer Robin Alexander agreed. Two years ago, the Union actually planned to slightly increase the top tax rate to provide counter-financing. The resulting criticism – “including from my newspaper,” as Alexander admitted – intimidated the Union. So exactly the mechanisms that Lang complained about on Sunday were at work. Merz should have endured this criticism, said Alexander. But Merz decided on the opposite of political leadership. “The center is no longer able to overcome its ideological shadow,” he concluded.

Lang also had an example of this. FDP leader Lindner suggested a renegotiation of the coalition agreement following a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court that overturned the budget at the beginning of the year. The SPD and the Greens rejected this – for fear of alienating voters. “I can’t say I was always on the right side. “That was my mistake too,” Lang admitted. In their current opinion, such a step could have saved the traffic lights.

The SPD and the Greens should therefore not make things too easy for themselves when analyzing the traffic light errors. “Christian Lindner” – that was the simplest answer, she said, referring to the FDP’s “D-Day” plans to break the coalition. “That’s not wrong, but it’s not really honest either,” Lang said.

The traffic light government has destroyed a lot of political culture. “Liberal democracies that become ever more pompous in their invocation of themselves, but more and more insubstantial in their dealings with reality, will eventually destroy themselves,” warned Lang.

Journalist Alexander was more optimistic: “Actually, everything is there in Germany for democracy to function,” he said. “Most people I meet like this are still quite sensible.”

The problem with the program: The three discussants largely agreed on the error analysis. “Politics does not address a number of problems in order not to drive voters into the wrong arms,” said Steinbrück. One of these truths is: “We will have to work more in Germany.” The weekly working hours are too low and the number of sick days is far too high. But no election campaigner dares to address this.

However, it was clearly not clear to the group that in the current election any of the four candidates for chancellor, from Habeck to Alice Weidel, could be the clear candidate for the major reforms. Steinbrück already had a bleak feeling: If things stayed like this, the election after next in 2029 would “become the acid test for our democracy.” At least he briefly praised the Greens: their position on Ukraine is much clearer than that of Steinbrück’s SPD.

One impression remained: clear words and demands only come to top politicians after they have lost their positions. The active personnel, on the other hand, have to be imagined as Sisyphus, but – different from Albert Camus – as unhappy people.