Ex-German vice chancellor announces move to California

Robert Habeck, former economy minister in Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, has told the press he will be focusing on research activities abroad

A former German vice chancellor and economy minister has announced he is quitting active politics for life in California. Robert Habeck, a former co-leader of the Green Party has told Germany’s Taz media that he will hand in his Bundestag mandate next Monday. 

Habeck will be devoting himself to research and teaching activities in overseas educational institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, in the US.

The traffic-light coalition government, which aside from the Greens, included Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), collapsed in November 2024 after failing to find common ground on how to address the multibillion-euro deficit in the 2025 budget.

Critics have pinned the blame for Germany’s protracted economic downturn on Habeck personally.

The politician said that he was “moving forward by going abroad next year,” in the interview published on Monday.

”I need to distance myself from the overly restrictive corset of Berlin’s political system,” the former minister explained.

Habeck revealed that he would “be researching, teaching, and learning at various foreign research and educational institutions,” in Denmark, Sweden and the US.

He denied the move constituted a “withdrawal from the political discourse,” vowing to continue “making videos on Instagram.”

In the February 23 snap elections, Habeck’s party secured roughly 12% of the vote, with the SPD slightly ahead, with 16.5% – their worst showing since World War II. The FDP barely cleared the 4.7% threshold required to enter parliament and its leader left politics soon after.

Under the new government, the economic woes have continued unchecked, with Chancellor Merz acknowledging on Saturday that Germany is “not just in a period of economic weakness, we are in a structural crisis.”

Moscow has repeatedly claimed that Berlin’s decision to de-couple from inexpensive Russian energy supplies in the wake of the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, was self-defeating.

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