The Zeitgeist

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,