When Jochen Reeh-Schall (SPD) accepted congratulations on his election as Bonn's new district mayor on Tuesday evening, many in the Bonn district council did not know that the number of seats in the Green district parliamentary group had already fallen by two from six to four and that the majority when combined with the SPD (three seats) and the Left (two) had been lost. The committee has 19 seats and they need ten for a majority.

Following the previous district mayor and Green city councillor Brigitta Poppe-Reiners, Karin Langer has now also resigned from the Green district faction. Langer is also leaving the party after 15 years of membership. The dispute over the awarding of the district mayor's post with the Greens had put her over the edge, the 52-year-old told the GA. For Langer, it is her first term of office as a holder of a local government mandate in Bonn. But she and Poppe-Reiners want to keep their mandates.

While Poppe-Reiners initially wants to be involved in the district committee without any factional ties, Langer has applied for membership of the citizens' movement Volt. Volt forms a parliamentary group with three representatives in the council, where the movement is represented for the first time. Volt has no seat in the district council. Langer was disappointed by the "post wrangling" among the Greens, which for her did not just begin with the scandal surrounding the deselection of Poppe-Reiner as candidate for the post of district mayor by her own district faction. "I was also annoyed by the Greens' scramble for the constituencies", Langer explained. The vocational school teacher is taking the Ecology Party to court: "Maybe I was too naive. But I was always concerned with content, but for a good year now, in my opinion, it has been mainly about people and posts". That is why she has now pulled the plug.

As reported, when Poppe-Reiners was nominated as the top candidate for the district faction by the members' meeting, she had declared that she wanted to run again for the office of district mayor. At last week's meeting of the six-member parliamentary group, things turned out differently: Eva Kuzu, a Green from Auerberg and new to the group, like Langer, thwarting Poppe-Reiners' plans, also applied for the post and was finally nominated as a candidate.

The Greens want to cooperate with both the SPD and the Left. But the SPD was initially against Kuzu. In the end, a solution was found: Jochen Reeh-Schall is to be district mayor for the next two years. Kuzu or another member of the Green Party faction is to succeed him in office. Poppe-Reiners threw in the towel and, on top of that, wants to leave the Council faction after 16 years. Her close party friend Hardy Lohmeyer is also considering leaving the group. "I was extremely annoyed with the way Brigitta was treated", he said on Tuesday evening. Lohmeyer, a planning expert and spokesperson for the party in the previous Council alongside Poppe-Reiner, did not want to say any more. If he really did turn his back on the parliamentary group with Poppe-Reiners, he would not achieve the required majority of 34 votes in the Green-Red-Red city council.

Poppe-Reiners received the words of thanks from her successor, Reh-Schall, together with flowers, with a straight face after the meeting of the district council. She was visibly more emotional when old companions like Herbert Spoelgen, Helmut Kollig (both SPD), Karl Wilhelm Starcke and Wolfgang Maiwald (both CDU), who had followed the election in the audience, presented the 63-year-old with a giant bouquet of flowers. Spoelgen: "We are of course delighted that Jochen Reeh-Schall has become district mayor. The affair with Ms Poppe-Reiners, on the other hand, is a tragedy. She does not deserve it," commented Spoelgen, shaking his head.

Nicole Bonnie (CDU) was elected first and Eva Kuzu second deputy of Reeh-Schall at the meeting of the district council. All elections were secret. The CDU has four seats, the SPD three and the Left Party two. The FDP, Bürger Bund Bonn , the party and the AFD are each represented by one representative.

In the early afternoon, Annette Standop, spokeswoman of the Greens' parliamentary group, reported to the GA. "I am shocked by this event. She said that the Group and the party were currently working hard to find a solution so that neither Poppe-Reiners nor Lohmeyer leave the Group. "I believe that the door has not yet been closed." Standop, on the other hand, considers the situation in the Bonn district faction to be irreversible. Its chairman, Rolf Beu, said: "I have absolute sympathy for the massive, personal consternation caused by an unexpected electoral defeat, which one can personally regard as completely unprecedented. But it is "politically intolerable", he said, if someone "privatises" his mandate and thus does not give a successor the chance.

Original text: Lisa Inhoffen

Translation: Mareike Graepel