The former Green Party federal chairwoman Ricarda Lang and the former SPD general secretary Kevin Kühnert have criticized the debate culture in Germany. The citizens’ skepticism towards the parties and the way the debates are conducted make it “incredibly difficult to make a policy that somehow reaches the population,” said Lang in the evening in the “Stern Hour” with Stern editor-in-chief Gregor Peter Schmitz in the Hamburg Körberforum. In addition, politics revolves too much around itself.

Kühnert said he had Retired from politics at the end of 2024because he had the feeling – “and I still have it to some extent – that the culture of debate in our society is broken.” Discussions that need to be held substantively are drawn to secondary theaters of war.

Lang warns against politics as incestuous navel-gazing

He sees a society “that, in my view, has not yet learned to deal with the digital media environment and the networks in which we all operate in an adult, confident manner and to have meaningful political discussions in it,” said Kühnert.

She said she noticed that some resigned politicians had the idea that things wouldn’t work out with this population Long. “And I think that’s totally dangerous.” For her it was always clear that “I want to stop doing politics when I become cynical”.

For example, she found the dispute between the Greens and the CDU after the state elections in Baden-Württemberg to be outlandish, in which it was only about “who was mean to whom”. She asked herself: “Who cares?”

For her, this is a kind of “self-referential, almost incestuous navel-gazing that we are seeing from a political operation that is increasingly circling around itself and no longer recognizes how many, many people are turning away in disappointment and irritation,” said Lang, who was federal chairwoman of the Greens from February 2022 to November 2024.