She can no longer explain to people what green politics actually stands for, writes Canan Bayram. That’s why she no longer wants to run for the Bundestag.
The Berlin Green Party member of the Bundestag Canan Bayram has decided not to run again in the next federal election due to dissatisfaction with her party’s course. She decided against running for office, “among other things because it is becoming less and less clear to me what the Alliance 90/The Greens party actually stands for,” Bayram wrote in a personal statement on Tuesday. “So I can no longer explain to people what we stand for or whether they can trust us.”
Bayram is considered to represent a decidedly left-wing course within the Greens. Since 2017, she has represented the Berlin constituency of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg-Prenzlauer Berg in the Bundestag as a directly elected member. Bayram followed Hans-Christian Ströbele, who was the first Green politician to be directly elected to the Bundestag.
The politician states that her political priorities are human rights, peace policy, anti-discrimination and tenant protection. In the Green parliamentary group, however, she has recently received “less and less approval for my argument or perspective,” Bayram now wrote. She is “increasingly in danger of becoming just a fig leaf for my group, which focuses its work less on human rights than on populist discourses.”
The Green politician wrote that she could not and would not support this. “That’s why I decided to move my political work outside of parliament.” However, she will continue to exercise her mandate until the next election.