Just recently, the 10-member federal executive board of Green Youth (GJ) declared in a statement that they would resign from all offices at the next federal congress in the middle of October, leave the parent party Alliance 90/The Greens en masse and found a “new, decidedly left-wing youth organisation.” This was followed by resignations of dozens of board members at the state level in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg, Hamburg and Lower Saxony.

The GJ leadership around Svenja Appuhn (26) and Katharina Stolla (26) is thus reacting to the Greens’ devastating election results this year and the complete discrediting of the party in the eyes of young voters. In the European elections, the Greens vote had almost halved in comparison to 2019, in Saxony the party received 5.1 percent of the vote. In Thuringia and Brandenburg, the Greens failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle, whereupon Green party leaders Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang resigned. The GJ executive board told the press that it had already made its decision several weeks earlier, independently of this.

The resignation statement calls for “finally putting the economy at the service of the people” and declares “that there is a need again for a strong left-wing force in Germany that appeals to precisely those who have turned away in recent years.” At the same time, the GJ leadership emphasises that it has no grudge against the party and does not want to harm it.

The split was entirely amicable, with both the rebels who left and the party rump around economics minister Robert Habeck expecting political gains from it. While Habeck has his sights set on the option of a Green-Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coalition government and openly puts the interests of the German arms industry at the centre as “minister of the arms industry,” the GJ leaders are trying to exploit the anger over the social catastrophe their party helped cause for their own political advancement.

The party leadership then hastened to announce a further shift to the right by the Greens. Felix Banaszak, who helped shape the CDU-Green state government negotiations in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2022 and is seeking the party leadership together with Habeck confidante Franziska Brantner, appealed to the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU: “Parties in the democratic spectrum must be able to form a coalition with each other.”

Renate Künast, a long-standing Green member of the Bundestag (federal parliament), welcomed the resignation of the GJ board members on the Maischberger talk show with the words: “Anyone who had socialist ideas was in the wrong place with the Greens from the start.”

The notoriously right-wing former Green Party politician Boris Palmer, who cheered the end of a supposed “hostile takeover” of the party by a “woke movement,” took the same line, declaring: “Anyone who wants to make policy against the economy and with Marx’s theories is simply in the wrong place in a Green Party.” According to media reports, Baden-Württemberg’s state Minister President Winfried Kretschmann was seeking Palmer’s return to the party.

In fact, however, the young politicians from the former Green Party have absolutely nothing to do with Marx and socialism. As a statement on the group’s homepage notes, all members “joined the Greens within the last ten years.” The political basis for these individuals joining the party is thus the right-wing government record of the Greens in 14 federal states, the bombing of Serbia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the introduction of the Hartz IV welfare cuts and the EU’s eastward expansion.

Far from mobilising against the policies of the federal government, a coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberal Democrats, Green Youth has fully supported it on the central issues and actively embraced the cornerstones of the Greens’ foreign policy—defence of the European Union (EU), support for Israel and the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

In a resolution adopted by its federal congress on October 1, 2022, Green Youth explicitly backed Germany’s pro-war policy in Ukraine, called for further “military support” for the Ukrainian regime and rejected calls for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine as a “dictated peace.” Meanwhile, the NATO powers are considering giving Ukraine the green light to use the long-range missiles they have delivered on targets within Russia, and are blatantly accepting the possibility of nuclear war.

The last federal congress of Green Youth on October 22, 2023, also supported Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza. The resolution titled “Solidarity with Israel” describes the Zionist state apparatus as a “haven for Jewish life” that has the “right to defend itself and free the hostages.” Under this false slogan, the extremist right-wing Netanyahu government, with the support of the West, has launched a genocide that according to scientific estimates, has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and now is provoking an all-out war in the entire region.

The same resolution repeats the Western war propaganda that the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were “human shields” and that the Palestinian fighters had set up “bases in schools and hospitals.” It concludes: “It is right for the German government to support Israel: financially, with humanitarian aid and also militarily.”

With their resignation, the GJ leadership is trying to cover up this support for the federal government while pursuing the core right-wing aspects of Green Party policy in a new guise. To exploit the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Left Party, this is to be combined with occasional lip service to the issue of social inequality, something from which the Green Party has definitively distanced itself.

Workers and young people should reject these attempts at deception and harbour no illusions about the new formation. Its political foundation will be to support the geopolitical interests of German imperialism and to cover this up with some social demagogy. Having fully supported the Greens pro-war policy, these junior politicians are now trying to exploit anger over the social catastrophe this is causing for their own advancement.

The alternative to the politics of war and social austerity, which are pursued by all bourgeois parties, lies in building the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) and its youth organisation, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).