For the Greens, the election year 2023 has started very badly. In Berlin, after its mediocre performance and a rift with the SPD, the party is threatened with going into opposition, in the election of the mayor of Mainz, the Green candidate had no chance against a non-party candidate, and in Frankfurt, the Green candidate to succeed Peter Feldmann, who was voted out of office, did not even make it to the runoff.
This is not an accumulation of coincidences. Especially in municipalities, the Greens have become programmatically and habitually a milieu party in which the concerns and needs of ordinary people find no resonance.
Towards a knowledge-based society
Green majorities now reliably exist in student or middle-class inner city districts and the residential districts of the well-heeled. And the higher the level of formal education, the greater the likelihood that the Greens will be the party of choice.
For the future, these are not bad prospects, as demography plays into the hands of the Greens for the time being, as does the transformation towards a knowledge society. But in today's increasingly fierce distribution struggles, the Greens are pursuing a clientele policy similar to that of the FDP.
Even if Green and Yellow differ programmatically in many ways, they are socio-structurally a reflection of the cross-front of the AfD and the Left Party.