Episode 120: The Issues Driving German Politics One Month from the Bundestag Election
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Omid Nouripour
Member of the Bundestag (Alliance 90/The Greens)
Omid Nouripour was born on June 18, 1975, in Tehran, Iran. At the age of thirteen, he moved with his family—parents and sister—to Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2002, Mr. Nouripour became a German citizen and now holds both Iranian and German passports. Since 1996, Omid Nouripour has been an active member of the German Green Party (Alliance 90/The Greens). In September 2006, Omid Nouripour entered the German Bundestag, succeeding Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister. From February 2022 to November 2024, Omid Nouripour served as co-chair of Alliance 90/The Greens. In November 2024, he stepped down as co-chair but continues to serve as a member of parliament. His political focus includes foreign policy, human rights, migration, as well as European affairs and defense policy.
With the German elections slated for February 23, Member of the Bundestag Omid Nouripour, a former national co-chairman of the Green Party, joins The Zeitgeist to discuss the issues shaping the campaign. He analyzes challenges that the next coalition will face and the outlook for transatlantic relations with a new U.S. administration.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guest
Omid Nouripour, Member of the Bundestag (Alliance 90/The Greens)
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
I want to welcome all of our listeners to this episode of The Zeitgeist. We are really pleased to have with us Omid Nouripour. Omid, welcome.
Omid Nouripour
Thank you for having me.
Jeff Rathke
Omid Nouripour is a directly elected member of the Bundestag from the area around Frankfurt or Frankfurt and environs. He has been a member of the Bundestag for almost twenty years, occupying a seat that was previously held by Joschka Fischer—is that correct?
Omid Nouripour
Exactly.
Jeff Rathke
And as you may guess from that, he is a member of the Green Party, and from February 2022 until November 2024, so for about two and a half years, he was also the co-chair of the national Green Party, so one of the most important figures in the party over the last several years. With that in mind, it is a terrific opportunity to talk with you, Omid. You’re in the middle of an election campaign, right?
Omid Nouripour
Yep, and it’s getting more and more intensified by circumstances, international and national.
Jeff Rathke
I think that’s what we’re going to try to peel back a bit. We’ll start by talking a bit about what’s happening in Germany and in this election campaign in particular. And then we will think about how that relates to the new U.S. administration. It seems to me when I look at the German election campaign, there are two or three big issues that stand out, but before giving my impression, I’d like to hear yours. What are the two or three things that are most important—from your point of view—for German voters and for Germany right now?
Omid Nouripour
By far the most important issue is a society which is feeling a huge amount of fatigue, fatigue of crises, and we had and we have a lot of crises. One is inflation, something which is of course well-known in the United States in the last years. Of course, we have the post-COVID depression of a lot of people. People are exhausted of the war in Ukraine, as the people in Ukraine are. We have one migration debate and issue after another. We have issues of public security. And so on and so on. And of course, the question of climate crises is a big one, not only for my party. We are seeing a lot of extreme weather coming in and harming a lot and destroying a lot of lives and welfare in this country. You asked me what’s the biggest issue. The biggest issue is how to get more resistance on crises.
Jeff Rathke
One of the things that this coalition for its three years in power, it started off famously characterizing itself as a future-oriented coalition, taking new approaches, spanning party boundaries in new ways. And that lasted less than a full legislative term. Do you think that the sense of optimism, the sense of being able to master challenges, has diminished in Germany, or is it shifting in some way?
Omid Nouripour
You know, I was the guy who invented the term of a transitional coalition, that’s how I called the coalition we had, and to be honest, I’m very proud of what we achieved. We started with a with some kind of an optimism and a very few weeks after the beginning of the period, the war in Ukraine has been escalated by the Russian side and it was a huge challenge for energy supply, for inflation to tackle, and so on and so on, and we achieved a lot. But after sixteen years of a subjective kind of stability in this country where Merkel just told to anybody, “don’t be concerned; I’m going to do it for you.” I have a lot of doubts if she did, but the mood of the people was, there is a government there led by Angela Merkel, and then she knows what she’s doing.
In the first year, the new government was struggling with substantial crises. Buying gas, discussing the question of how to deal with the Atomausstieg, the question of banning nuclear energy in Germany, and if you should extend that date for a couple of months, then it came to an end. It faded out.
But at the beginning of 2023, I would say, it crumbled. So we went on achieving and we went on delivering, but we started discussing and questioning our own achievements publicly among the coalition. The mood of the people was not that they know what they’re doing anymore, because we were questioning, anybody was just elaborating dots and that we would be doing by ourselves. So we missed to give that stability which is needed, to give this country and to this Republic a sense of being well-governed. And this is why we failed, at the end. This is why the elections are not taking place in a regular term on September 25, but now. And the next government has not a lot of space for maneuver when it comes to dealing with each other. They have to be more relaxed when it comes to the attitude. They have to be more concerned and more aware of not only what you’re doing, but how you sell it. So it’s not getting easier. It’s not only a shift, we shrink space for public discussions among coalition partners for next year.
But. It’s not the worst thing you could do.
Jeff Rathke
Omid, your party just held an election conference, agreed on an election platform, over the weekend. We’re speaking on January 27, by the way. There are a few things that stand out to me, at least. And one is the way in which the migration issue has dominated political discussion over the last few days with some new proposals from the opposition leader Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU, about checking documents at all of Germany’s borders. In other words, a change to the regime that has been in place under Schengen, it’s already been scaled back, even under this government. Do you see this backlash on migration as fundamentally shaping the election campaign, and if so, what’s the Green vision for dealing with this?
Omid Nouripour
Not sure yet if this going to be the decisive topic. Twenty-seven days are a long time to go still. But now this issue is getting greater, to be honest. The major reason for that are the security incidents in the public room. We had a nightmare of an incidence last week where a man stabbed a 2-year-old boy eight times, and no society can swallow that. No person with a heart can just sit there and say, OK this could happen. Shouldn’t have, never should have happened. So it’s our job to do everything we can so that this is not happening. This murderer was of Afghan origin, and this is why the debate is the way it’s going, getting bigger and bigger in these days.
Besides that, there is a common sense among the parties that the numbers are too high. The numbers in this country are too high. We cannot guarantee integration work. People are coming in and the communities and the municipalities are struggling because there is a lack of personnel. There is a lack of apartments or a lack of funding to bring these people away, and you can’t do proper integration work with them. So the numbers are too high. The question is how to deal with that, and this is the moment where we have the discussion starts among parties here. I think within the democratic parties—Social Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, and the Green ones—the biggest distances between the Green ones and the Conservatives. Let me focus on the main distance we have, the main issue we have to discuss. Merkel, when she was in office, she always said that we need a European solution, and we are working it. And we fully agree on that. And Merkel did not deliver a European solution because there was no way to find common sense among twenty-seven—then twenty-eight—countries. Now we have one.
We have a legal framework given by the European Union. It took years. Now we have we have a solution for that, and the solution is we need a severe regime of control at the European borders. So we can save freedom of movement within the European Union, which is highly important for the single market. Just shutting down the borders would not mean that there are people waiting for coming into Germany, but trucks are waiting, which are part of the supply chains of our companies. So it would be bad for our economy. This is what we strongly believe in. And after we finally got a legal framework on the European level, we should implement it immediately and severely, it’s OK. But the Conservatives say, no, we need national measures, which we could discuss, but it would be only about migration. But it’s bad for the economy. It’s bad for the European Union. It’s bad for the single market. This is the discussion we have these days, and I hope that we can overcome some procedures which are not the usual ones in Parliament and hopefully have a common platform of discussion among the democratic parties very soon so we can resolve the problem. There is no denial of the problems we have. The numbers are too high. There is lack of a public security and people are feeling that; this is bad. In the end if we do not tackle this, we do not point that out and fix it, that’s going to help the extremists, and the extremists are on all sides. We have right wing extremism in this country. And there is a jihadi extremism in this country, which is getting stronger also. This is why we have to fix it immediately.
Jeff Rathke
Right. Another big concern, you mentioned it at the start, inflation. More generally, Germany’s economy has been stagnant for the last few years, certainly since the pandemic. There have been a variety of ideas circulating since the pandemic about how to address Germany’s competitiveness and to spur economic growth. The economics minister—a leader of your party, Robert Habeck—and the chancellor candidate for the Greens has talked about subsidies for investment, incentives for investment. You have a call for deregulation and lower taxes coming from the Liberals and from the CDU/CSU. If you think about the fact that a coalition government needs to be formed at the end of this election campaign, which is going to take place February 23, what is the way forward to preserve Germany’s high value-added manufacturing-based economy in changing international circumstances?
Omid Nouripour
We have a double crisis of our economy in these days. There is a conjectural one and then a structural one. And the structure of the crisis is first, the energy prices are far too high. Second, you have a lack of labor forces. Third, we have a lack of modernity of our infrastructure in this country in these days, especially when it comes to digital infrastructure of the country. Fourth, the bureaucracy is massive. There’s too much bureaucracy in this country for our companies. And the very last one is the gender inequality is also harming the economy. I’m not talking about the identity issues. I’m talking about equal pay. I’m talking about 820,000 women in this country who would love to go and work 40 hours a week and then cannot because there is a lack of kindergartens in this country. And these five aspects are bad, and we have to tackle all of them.
And I started with the energy prices because it’s the one which is, I wouldn’t call it the quick fix, but just the one we can tackle immediately, and we’ve started. The reason for the energy prices in this country is mainly because we’re completely dependent on Russian fossils, and they stopped coming. The reason of that is the war in Ukraine. And without them, we had to buy lot of gas and LNG all across the globe. Super high prices. And if you want to get rid of that also—and we won’t get rid of gas. We’re going to need gas for the next decade. And there is a power plant strategy of Robert Habeck that we need forty new power plants based on gas for the next ten to fifteen years in this country that we’re going to build them. The trick is to build them H2-ready so we can, in the day we have enough H2 in this country, you can just switch them. But the other solution is, the long term solution, is renewables. And if you have now 60 percent of electricity in this country being produced for renewables and going to increase in the next years. And this is good. This is the right way to go. The nuclear issue has been discussed a lot, but to be honest, there are a bunch of reasons why we are not going there—if you want me to, I can elaborate a couple of them. But the energy prices is the issue we have to tackle it first. The others, also, but this is the main issue.
Can I tell you one? Just one argument on a nuclear power?
Jeff Rathke
Yeah, sure.
Omid Nouripour
There are a bunch of reasons I could refer to, [but for now] just one. Rosneft and Gazprom are banned in the EU. Nobody’s buying, and there are good reasons for that. You buy gas from Russia, you’re funding their massive aggression in Ukraine and other countries, so nobody’s buying gas and oil from Russia. There’s no ban on Rosatom because there are countries in Europe who are still depending on nuclear fuel coming from Russia. And the United States in the last three years has spent billions of dollars for Russian nuclear fuel because there is not enough of that in the market.
If you want to get there, it’s going to take a couple of years to get there. So now after having this bad experience of dependency of Russia as a dictatorship, I think it was a good idea to cut that tie and try not to get dependent on another level on Russia.
Jeff Rathke
That brings us directly to foreign policy, and you mentioned at the very start, there is exhaustion in Ukraine but also in Europe from the Russian war against Ukraine. There’s the trajectory of the war, which is one important question, and Europe’s massive support to Ukraine. There is also the broader security question about what Germany, Europe, and indeed the United States, need to do to be better prepared for the security threats that Russia represents. And I noticed that in the election program that the Greens passed this weekend, there was something quite different from 2021, the last election campaign, and that was an endorsement of defense spending at or above the 2 percent of GDP level. The Greens were much more reluctant about that in 2021.
Omid Nouripour
Definitely above.
Jeff Rathke
That doesn’t quite go as far as what Robert Habeck has said, where he talked about the possibility of spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defense. Is this an issue around which the Green Party is united?
Omid Nouripour
Yes, because we are seeing that the armed forces in Germany are not prepared for the new scenery we are seeing in Ukraine and, hopefully not, but maybe in other countries also. Have you seen the hybrid of Russia against our country? My party, traditionally, has been reluctant when it came to military force in general but always been against Putin. We’ve been the only party in the German parliament always arguing against Gazprom, against Nord Stream pipelines 1 and 2. So having said that, you’re seeing that times are changing, that the security order, the peace order, in Europe is threatened by Russia. This is why we know that we have to be prepared, and we know that the Americans will not deliver cheap security anymore. This is more than obvious, and we understand that. This is why we talk about 3.5 percent. And the chiefs of defense of NATO came together a couple of months talking about 3 percent. So the 2 percent are now given by Germany; it’s an obligation of this country. By the way, we never thought that it should be about a figure. We never thought that these figures are effective ones. It’s about what is needed, and when we talk about what is needed, 2 percent are not enough in Germany anymore. Definitely not. This is more than obvious. There is a lack of personnel also in the armed forces; there is a lack of helicopters and deployment skills in our forces, which are more than visible. And it’s always dangerous to have this lack of skills being visible. This is why we are united and then we know that there is a dire need of higher spending for defense in these days.
Jeff Rathke
And then last question and that is—
Omid Nouripour
Already!
Jeff Rathke
Yes! You’re not getting off easy, but we want to be respectful of your time, because you’ve got a campaign to be carrying out as well.
Relations with the United States: something you’ve been involved with for decades as a Member of Parliament. The relationship with the United States and the approach of the U.S. administration under President Trump is, of course, quite different now. To what degree is the United States and the relationship with the U.S. a source of instability for Germany? And to what degree do you do you see the prospect, the potential for continued cooperation?
Omid Nouripour
I’m a transatlanticist by heart, and I was the vice president of the U.S. caucus in the German Bundestag when Donald Trump was sworn in in 2017. And I think it was the first week when he signed the executive order on the so-called Muslim Ban.
I’ve been born in Iran, so I have Iranian citizenship I just cannot give away because Iranians just did not release you out of their nationality. So I was affected by that also. My visa for the United States had been revoked. And a lot of people ask me, what is this doing to me emotionally? And yes, I still would repeat that transatlantic relations are not only the question of who is chancellor in Germany and who is sitting in the Oval Office. It’s about countries, about people, about friendship, about shared values. So I don’t think that the friendship between United States and Germany is harmed or will be harmed.
But the honest answer to your question is, I don’t know what’s going to happen. And as long as I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m not sure if the interests are crossing or coming together. I think that tariffs are bad for both sides. There are a lot of jobs being created by German companies, for example for the automotive industry from Germany. A lot of jobs in the United States are created by them, just one example. At the end of the day tariffs will mean that we are weakening ourselves in times where we should stand together against the autocrats and against other systems like China and Russia. I can’t even answer because we are a little bit in a riddle, what’s going to happen next?
Getting out of the Paris accord on climate is not in our interest, but we think it’s not in the interest of anyone. Drilling and just “drilling baby” is nothing which we can endorse. Not because it’s good or bad for the oil prices. Of course, more oil in the world market would mean cheaper prices and could be good for us also, but in the long term it’s going to make everything more fragile, the entire environment more fragile, and that would be bad for anybody. We are sitting there and of course we are reading every single breaking news from the United States and all of the executive orders being now signed. And there are a lot of things which are not, you know, in terms of friendship. But at the end of the day, we are ready to cooperate. We are ready to work together. If there is a solution for the war in Ukraine, for example, which can be delivered by the U.S. president, which is not against the will of the Ukrainian people, because this is the country we’re talking about, they are the main affected people, it will be good for anybody, so it could be a great cooperation. We are ready for everything, and we know that we’re not just two sides of the entire planet. There are others we have to reach out to.
Jeff Rathke
February 23. Elections to the German Bundestag and we will look forward to seeing the result. Omid, we will keep in touch and we will look forward to talking with you again sometime very soon. Wishing you all the best and thank you for spending time with us today.
Omid Nouripour
Did you wish me that once again, to win that constituency in Frankfurt, the most beautiful city on Earth? Thank you!
Jeff Rathke
Well, good luck, Omid. And thank you for being with us. We look forward to having all of our listeners with us on the next episode of The Zeitgeist.
Omid Nouripour
Thank you so much.
