said “everyone should expect” February 23 to be the date of the early election in Germany.
Despite his party’s poor performance in recent polling — they have dropped to around 12% — he pointed to an increase in party membership as a sign the Greens are ready for a short campaign.
“It’s only six days since the German government collapsed. Since then, I would say my party gained momentum. We have 5,500 new members within five days, that is unprecedented,” Habeck told reporters during a press conference at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
He added that the party would usually consider a “wave” of applications to be around 2,000.
Habeck also signaled his willingness to enter a coalition with the conservative . The center-right opposition party currently has a significant lead in the polls and joining a CDU government as a junior partner is Habeck’s only realistic route back into government.
He noted that previous coalitions between the CDU and the Greens on the level of state governments.
“I come from Schleswig-Holstein and I was involved in governments two times and the second one was with the conservatives. In Schleswig-Holstein that was something unusual,” he said. That coalition also involved the liberal FDP.
Any coalition talks with the CDU could be complicated by their Bavarian sister party, the . Its leader, , has repeatedly attacked Habeck in public and ruled out working with him.
Habeck came to Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech conference, with an all-women delegation of startup founders. He said it was important to him to attend, despite the political crisis at home, to support German and European tech companies.
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