Tarek Al-Wazir will certainly not make the mistake of his Berlin party colleagues and their top candidate Bettina Jarasch. Unlike the Berlin Greens, Hesse's Oberealo has long since said goodbye to a pure policy for his own eco-clientele during his time in government with the CDU. He is "not the type Kreuzberg, but rather the model semi-detached house".

The family man from Offenbach brings his election campaign concept to this catchy formula when he is nominated as the top candidate, which is aimed at the bourgeois center and thus also deep into the milieus of the CDU and FDP. As a left-winger of the Greens, even with an immigrant background, as one who unscrupulously concurred with "communists", Roland Koch's CDU had once painted him as a bogeyman.

Ten years as Minister for Economic Affairs

After ten years as pragmatic economics and transport minister, who co-governed amicably alongside Koch's successor Volker Bouffier, Al-Wazir is far better known and possibly more popular than the new CDU Prime Minister Boris Rhein.

Unlike in the capital, the Greens in Hesse were just ahead of the SPD in the last state election. In 2018, the FDP was still hesitant to elect Al-Wazir as prime minister of a traffic light coalition, who would also have ended the harmonious black-green alliance. That could be different after the October election.