Personnel changes after the state elections: Greens need a new general

After the elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, personnel changes are looming in the board of the Greens. As the taz has learned from party circles, General Secretary Pegah Edalatian will not run for office again at the federal party conference in December. Instead, she wants to apply for the position of deputy chairwoman. The reason given is that once the structural reforms have been completed, she wants to devote more time to substantive work again. She decided to take the step before Sunday's elections.

Edalatian has been a member of the party executive committee since 2022, initially as vice-chairman. In the fall of 2024, she was promoted to Secretary General (referred to as “Political Management” in Green jargon at the time). Since then, she has had little influence on the image of the Green Party leadership from the outside world, but she had the main responsibility for two difficult internal party projects: the reform of the party statutes and the redesign of the ombudsman structures for cases of sexual harassment, which had become necessary after the affair surrounding MP Steffen Gelbhaar. Both projects were hard-fought and still succeeded in the end.

Nevertheless, Edalatian's support in the party remained limited. In August, the Table.Briefings portal reported that there were efforts to persuade her not to run for another term. Instead, Sven Giegold would again be interested in the position. The former MEP wanted the job two years ago, but couldn't get it back then. Instead, he has been sitting on the board as deputy chairman ever since.

One of the things that works in his favor as Secretary General is that, as a co-founder of Attac at the turn of the millennium, he is familiar with networking and campaign work. But some in the party also have reservations about him, and he has not yet publicly expressed his ambitions.

It is therefore conceivable that Edalatian and Giegold will not simply swap places, but that other candidates will emerge and join the board. Accordingly, the current general secretary cannot be sure that she will remain part of the party leadership at all.

However, her supporters in the party warn against abandoning it completely. “She has gained an incredible amount of experience through her work over the last few years and understands the party, the structures and the people in depth,” says one of them. Others point to content-related competencies and Edalatian's contributions to internal diversity processes. As the board's diversity policy spokesperson, she has built up new structures and networks in this area over the years.

If Edalatian and Giegold not only swap positions, the Greens will also face a difficult puzzle game, as official and unofficial quota rules apply to the six-member Green Board. According to the statutes, only two members of the Bundestag are allowed to belong to the committee. With chairmen Franziska Brantner and Felix Banaszak, whose replacement is not in sight, these two places are already occupied.

The two party wings are usually represented equally. Giegold and Edalatian belong to the left wing. If someone from the Realo wing were to run against her, the previous Realo representatives Heiko Knopf (also deputy chairman) and Gesine Märtens (treasurer) would be in question.

If Knopf (Thuringia regional association) and Märtens (Saxony) were to be eliminated, someone else from East Germany would have to come in instead. If it were to end for Edalatian, whose family comes from Iran, it would also need another non-white person. And of course there can't be more than three men. When the board was reorganized two years ago, the party was preoccupied with such questions for weeks. There shouldn't actually be much interest in a new edition.