Green party leaders are calling for a course correction in dealing with the AfD

The leaders of the Green parliamentary group have declared their party's previous strategy against the AfD to have failed and have called for a course correction. “All previous attempts to counter the AfD have not been enough,” wrote parliamentary group leaders Katharina Dröge and Britta Haßelmann in an “impulse paper” from which “Spiegel” quoted on Saturday.

All democratic parties, including the Greens, bear responsibility for the strengthening of the AfD, which is partly right-wing extremist.

“Nobody should just carry on as before – not even us Alliance Greens,” wrote Dröge and Haßelmann, according to “Spiegel”. “If everyone sticks to the beliefs that they have always thought were right, we will not be any the wiser.”

The two faction leaders come to the conclusion that the party can no longer reach many citizens simply by advocating for the democratic system. “We have to realize that our campaign to save democracy now only sounds abstract and far away to many,” says the five-page paper.

“In the desire to protect democracy and the rule of law, we seem to too many like defenders of the status quo, a status quo that no longer works well for people in everyday life,” state Dröge and Haßelmann.

In order to score better against the AfD, the democratic parties must offer tangible solutions for the people, demand the two group leaders. It is the structurally weak regions in which the promises of the right-wing populists are heard most, according to their analysis:

"Regions in which people feel forgotten by politics. It is the task of all democratic parties to counter this impression and ensure that this changes."