The Greens' criticism of the allegations against Robert Habeck and his state secretary Patrick Graichen sometimes sounds so wistful that one might think that the green-alternative outsider, who is oppressed by the establishment, is still speaking. Ironically, a Green politician like Jürgen Trittin, a master of the campaign, complains that it is a campaign. The Greens should know that a campaign does not say anything about whether its purpose is justified or not. After all, campaigns, even nasty ones, have brought them to where they are, to the levers of power.

Habeck and Graichen now have to face up to the standards that their party likes to apply to their supposedly sinful competition, but which they only want to apply to a limited extent for themselves, because they are without fault or blame. In green-led ministries, whether in Rhineland-Palatinate or in Berlin, the principle all too often applies: Green purpose justifies green means.

No state secretary of another party could have afforded to make his friend and best man the managing director of a federal agency without scandal and personnel consequences. But the Greens? Habeck had the decision annulled – case settled? After all, he did not follow the line of Trittin, who was anything but a good advisor for Annalena Baerbock in the Bundestag election campaign. The minister openly admits the mistake. Will disciplinary proceedings now follow?

Habeck has not regained confidence as a result. It is implausible that the minister is said to have known nothing at all about the personnel in question. It is also implausible that green politics in the face of nepotism should be much more than the performance of yes-men in bureaucracy and science. The latest result is a piece of legislation that has absurd side effects before it has even been adopted. The traffic light sees this as a race to catch up after years of the "Altmaier kink". Another campaign by the Greens. A nasty one at that.