Berlin – She exhausted herself in the election campaign, and in the end you could see it in her too. Bettina Jarasch, the top candidate of the Greens in Berlin, looked a little paler and also a little more irritable than usual. In the election arena at the television station rbb, for example, the last live broadcast debate four days before the election.
Three women and three men who want to take over the Red Town Hall argued again about rents, bike paths, clinic strikes, the big Berlin issues. But the topic with which Jarasch and the Greens entered the election campaign never came up. She mentioned it herself once, you could tell that she was annoyed. In the end, should this election really not be about the climate?
Could she still convince fans of the climate list?
“Make Berlin the green capital”, was the slogan with which Jarasch started. A politician whose name two out of three Berliners had never heard of. Nevertheless, it was ahead, very far ahead in fact. At the end of April, polls showed the Greens in Berlin at 27 percent – ten percentage points ahead of the SPD. Maybe that made the Greens cocky? They printed Jarasch’s name so small on the election posters that it didn’t matter who wanted to become mayor for them and whether the Berliners knew their top candidate or not. After all, the Greens wanted to turn “parking lots into parks”, who needs a face?
Bettina Jarasch hurried from appointment to appointment until the very end, on Saturday a week ago she visited all twelve districts again. In twelve hours, with twelve means of transport. Of course only with environmentally friendly ones. At the potato festival in Dahlem, a children’s bicycle demo in Reinickendorf or collecting rubbish in a Pankower Park, she should not have met the average Berliner.
But maybe in the end it will be enough to mobilize your own supporters? The polls for the Greens crashed in the summer, the SPD passed and was also ahead in the last polls. Sometimes more, sometimes less clearly. Bettina Jarasch seemed to be catching up again. A survey saw the Greens in Berlin almost on a par with the SPD – at the same time, many respondents said they were still undecided or wanted to vote for small parties.
In the end, could the Greens win over fans of the climate list, the animal protection party or Volt? A victory for Jarasch or a close race with her competitor Franziska Giffey would be the surprise of the evening in Berlin.
However, even a week before the election, more than 60 percent of Berliners still didn’t know who the top candidate was. So at the end a reminder: Bettina Jarasch, 52, came to Berlin from Augsburg 29 years ago, was a journalist, co-boss of the Berlin Greens, where she is called “bridge builder” because she reconciled the camps. A skill that could also be helpful in coalition negotiations.