Klemens Griesehop has been with the Greens since 1990. “Always at the grassroots level,” as he emphasizes. In the three and a half decades since he joined, the party has vacated a number of positions – and the teacher from Berlin-Pankow has endured it bravely each time. The tightening of asylum laws in the traffic light coalition was hard for him, the invitation by Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche at a party conference in the tens, the Kosovo war anyway. “At that time I was on the verge of giving up,” says Griesehop. “But Hans-Christian convinced me to stay.”
The Green Party veteran Hans-Christian Ströbele has been dead for more than three years now, and leaving the party could be serious for Griesehop this time. “If they really eliminate grassroots democracy, then the question will arise again for me,” he says.
The Green Party leadership is planning a comprehensive reform of the party statutes. A commission headed by Political Director Pegah Edalatian has drawn up proposals over the past few months, and the committee is currently completing its deliberations. The plans are to be approved by the federal executive board and presented to the party in February. The members will then vote on it in June.
The Greens want a “modern” statute. Changes to the leadership structures, which have been an issue for years, are being discussed: The management position could, as with other parties, be upgraded to Secretary General. The party council – located below the executive board and with comparatively little power – could be strengthened. It is still unclear whether the commission actually recommends both.
Member councils and new hurdles
The plans for member participation are clearer. In an internal webinar for the party base in mid-January, Edalatian revealed two suggestions. On the one hand, the commission members were “very much in agreement” about including the possibility of convening “member councils” in the statutes. They are intended to function analogously to citizens’ assemblies, which the Bundestag, among others, has experimented with in recent years.
2023 discussed there randomly selected citizens for four months on the topic of “Changing Nutrition”, their recommendations were subsequently presented to Parliament. Accordingly, Green member councils could hold debates and develop proposed resolutions in the future.
On the other hand, the commission wants to increase the hurdles for submitting applications and amendments at party conferences. So far, in keeping with the grassroots democratic tradition of the Greens, they have been comparatively low: not only party committees and divisions such as boards of directors, federal working groups and district associations are allowed to submit applications, but also individual members – they only have to collect 50 supporter signatures from the party. For comparison: The CDU requires 500 members to support an application, whereas ordinary members of the SPD and Left Party are not entitled to apply at all.
Negotiations until late at night
The Greens make extensive use of their generous right to apply. For example, 1,900 requests for changes were received for the special party conference on the federal election program a year ago. This causes a lot of work. Every application must go through the party’s own application committee. The authors are influenced individually so that they withdraw proposals, combine them with similar proposals or agree to compromises. The negotiations on this drag on in the back rooms of party congresses, often late into the night.
The commission says that the high number of applications is now leading to “overwhelming demands”. In January 2025, processing during the hot election campaign tied up capacity at party headquarters for weeks.
At the same time, delegates and members no longer have a chance to keep track of the party conference debates. Given the flood of applications, many of them “now find it opaque what is being decided,” said Edalatian during the webinar. The quorum for applications should now be high. From the perspective of the top, this is not to curtail grassroots democracy, but to save it.
The party leadership argues with the increased number of members: With 180,000 members, different rules should apply than before. It is not yet known exactly how many signatures an application will need in the future. A regulation like the one in North Rhine-Westphalia is conceivable: There, the number of members needed is one per mille – at the federal level that would currently be 180.
Little influence, many applications
“Then first-class grassroots democracy will be buried,” says the Berlin grassroots Green Griesehop. “How is a normal member supposed to find so many supporters? That’s not possible.” Griesehop is part of the “Independent Green Left”, a small group that has no personal influence in the party, but makes all the more eager use of the opportunity to submit proposals to the party conference.
In terms of content, some of them are compatible with the Greens. Griesehop claims that his group has pushed through formulations in party conference negotiations on the supply chain law, glyphosate and climate money in recent years.
At the same time, a lot of things about the basic group are quite retro: Hans-Christian Ströbele regularly appeared as a guest at their meetings during his lifetime, says Griesehop. Accordingly, today we see ourselves “to a certain extent as a representative of Ströbi and Petra Kelly”. At party conferences, members often appear in uniform motto shirts, for example in 2024 with a dove of peace and the slogan “Diplomacy now!”. For the last party conference, Griesehop submitted a motion against “war-fighting”, “militarization” and “compulsory service in the Bundeswehr”.
And most recently, the group defended the EU Parliament’s controversial decision on the Mercosur free trade agreement in an open letter – while the Greens had influence The bank now calls it a mistakeeven those who voted for him in the EU Parliament.
Not the first attempt
So you can say that Griesehop and his colleagues have a penchant for hopeless fights. But with the fight over the statutes, even their ability to suffer could now come to an end. However, it is not yet clear that they will actually lose the argument.
As early as 2022, the federal executive committee at the time wanted to significantly increase the hurdles for party conference applications. 20 supporters were enough until then. The board wanted 1 per mille, like in North Rhine-Westphalia. After resistance from the party, he was satisfied with a compromise: At that time, the hurdle was increased to the 50 signatures that are valid today.
The leadership probably wouldn’t have gotten any more than that: the change was up for vote at a party conference at the time. Changes to the statutes require a two-thirds majority with at least 50 percent participation. As much as a majority of the Greens like to keep up with the times, these hurdles are not without their problems.
Legal dispute with tradition
It is controversial whether they also apply to changes to the statutes through a member survey. The statutes are not clearly formulated at this point. The party leadership is of the opinion that a simple majority is sufficient for a ballot vote – even if only a small proportion of the members vote. This would make it easier to implement a change in the statutes than at a party conference. Griesehop sees it differently and is already threatening: “If necessary, we’ll go to court. After all, it’s about the core of the Greens.”
This debate is not new either. In 2002, the board wanted to relax the strict separation of office and mandate and allow party leaders to sit in the Bundestag. A party conference rejected the application because the necessary two-thirds majority was missing. A few months later there was a ballot on the same question.
Even then, the party leadership declared that a simple majority was enough. The opponents threatened to sue. But the result made the dispute unnecessary: More than half of the members voted, and 66.89 percent supported the change to the statutes.
In the taz interview we even had to one of the most stubborn supporters of the old arrangement admit defeat. “I assume that there will be no more legal disputes. That would be the last thing we need now,” said Hans-Christian Ströbele the day after the count.