Person of the week: Omid Nouripour
The new leader of the Greens is foreign minister in reserve
By Wolfram Weimer
01/25/2022, 09:15 am
The Greens elect new leaders. One half of the future duo is the foreign politician Omid Nouripour from Frankfurt am Main. With him, not only a Muslim party chairman. He’s also a smart, humorous realo and the party’s shadow foreign minister.
The Greens are sorting themselves out and electing a new party leadership: Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck are resigning from their posts, while the party left Ricarda Lang and Realo Omid Nouripour are applying as the new dual leadership. The choice of Nouripour is particularly exciting. With him, not only a Muslim is elected party leader. On top of that, the man doesn’t fit into any cliché. His enthusiasm for Eintracht Frankfurt is so great that one wonders whether the man is really a top politician or a habit wearer in the north-west curve of the Bundesliga club in the Main metropolis. A few weeks ago, Nouripour gave a taste of his ultra-passion on football radio when he roared at Frankfurt’s last-minute win over Union Berlin and then “Hey, get a doctor” groaned.
Nouripour appears in an elegant suit as a cosmopolitan foreign politician and board member of the Atlantic Bridge. Then again with a leather jacket or hoodie in the rapper mood. First he seems like a silly Ash Wednesday joker in Hesse, then like the serious victim of the Iranian dictatorship in Tehran. If you ask Spitzengrüne about Omid Nouripour over a glass of wine, then you hear two things regularly: “clever Persian” (amazingly politically incorrect) and “a Joschka-Fischer-Realo” (amazingly obvious). What will only be revealed with the last glass of wine – he is also a “foreign minister in reserve” if Annalena Baerbock should fail.
Nouripour has been the foreign policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bundestag since 2013 and also heads the German-Ukrainian parliamentary group – currently in particularly high demand as a well-informed expert. He came into contact with foreign policy early in life and more intensively than other German contemporaries. Nouripour lived in Iran for the first 13 years of his childhood. The brutal Mullah regime and the war against Iraq shaped his youth, and his parents fled to Germany. “My parents had the feeling that there were no prospects for their children in Iran. There was a rule that boys were no longer allowed to leave the country at the age of 14 so that they would not preventively evade military service. And my sister had the concours for the Uni passed with a top place, but fell through the ideological review because she didn’t go to Friday prayers. We then voted in the family council whether to leave Iran, and my father was outvoted,” Nouripour once told the “Spiegel”. One of his uncles was executed, another was injured by poison gas during the war, and his sister was arrested.
No desire for cook and waiter
Since then, Nouripour has had a keen eye on dictatorships, and a realpolitik one. Unlike the Left or the Peace Greens, he advocated airstrikes against the so-called Islamic State, advocates tough economic sanctions against Russia or has portrayed the SPD Foreign Minister Heiko Maas as a wimp with “absolute freedom of foreign policy”. Many feel sympathetic Nouripour’s style is reminiscent of Joschka Frischer. Both come from Frankfurt, have an anarchist side, are wild Eintracht fans, both have dropped out of college and are ambitious in terms of foreign policy. Nouripour moved into the Bundestag for the first time in 2006 as a direct successor to Fischer. With a strong election result in Frankfurt, he was one of the 16 Greens to win a direct mandate in last year’s federal election.
At Fischer, Nouripour experienced painfully how Chancellor Gerhard Schröder divided the government kitchen into cook and waiter. He wants to spare the Greens this time. When SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich spoke on the day the government was sworn in that German foreign policy was being controlled “particularly in the chancellery,” Nouripours came along Twitter reply quick as a counterattack by Eintracht: “No, Rolf Mützenich. Foreign policy is not ‘controlled in the Chancellery in particular’. To disparage the Foreign Office in this way is the traditional ‘Koch-Kellner logic’.”
In the Greens parliamentary group, Nouripour is popular because of his unpretentious cheerfulness and uncomplicated directness and is also seen as a “shadow foreign minister”. Should Baerbock fail and have to resign, he would be the predestined successor. If you ask Nouripour about this, he humorously evades: “I’d rather be Minister of Defense for Hesse. And besides: A foreign minister doesn’t walk around in a leather jacket.” What he does not say – he can also suit.