dpa | The German Green MPs in the EU Parliament get for her Voting behavior on the Mercosur trade agreement Headwind from within your own party. The majority of EU MPs from the German Greens voted to have the EU agreement with four South American countries reviewed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ): eight voted in favor, two against, and one abstained.
What is remarkable is the joint coordination with right-wing parties. In previous votes, the Greens had sharply criticized the European People’s Party (EPP), which also includes the CDU and CSU, for voting jointly with the far-right.
“The fact that some Greens, together with the AfD and the Left, are delaying the entry into force of the Mercosur agreement in the current political situation is politically stupid and instinctive,” said the first parliamentary managing director of the SPD parliamentary group, Dirk Wiese Rhenish Post.
Green Party leader Felix Banaszak tried to limit the damage on Deutschlandfunk. He was “not happy” with the result. “But you shouldn’t conjure up false alliances that didn’t exist at that point.” About the vote as a whole, he said: “In the current times (…) it does not send the signal of European determination and strength that I would have liked.”
Özdemir: “Not understanding the seriousness of the situation”
Banaszak, like his co-party leader Franziska Brantner, spoke out in favor of temporarily enacting the free trade agreement with the Mercosur confederation despite appealing to the ECJ. The German Greens also want to support this in the EU Parliament.
For the Greens in Germany, all of this comes at an inopportune time in a year with five state elections – the first of which in March in the car state of Baden-Württemberg, where the Greens are in danger of losing their only prime ministerial post.
Their top candidate there, Cem Özdemir, reacted accordingly sharply. “Obviously too many people still don’t understand the seriousness of the situation. European sovereignty must prove itself in concrete action, the time for cheap lip service is over,” he criticized on X.
Even the long-time Green Party member of the Bundestag, Jürgen Trittin, who, unlike Realo Özdemir, belongs to the left wing of the party, was horrified. “Without a compass,” he wrote on
North Rhine-Westphalia’s Economics Minister Mona Neubaur was also dissatisfied. “I regret that the European Parliament missed this opportunity,” said the Green politician.