»ACAB« | Green Youth: Jette Nietzard's stylish sweater

The Greens are a party that has adapted to the bourgeois political mainstream. Robert Habeck, Annalena Baerbock, and their ilk have demonstrated this time and again in the traffic light coalition government. Only occasionally does the Greens' once-rebellious nature still peek out from the uniformity that sets the tone in politics. Jette Nietzard occasionally ensures this. The 26-year-old chairwoman of the party's youth organization recently showed up wearing a snappy sweater. It wouldn't really be worth mentioning if it weren't for the slogan "ACAB." The acronym stands for "All Cops Are Bastards," which is Alemannic for people with poor English.

A saying that would be more appropriate in a squat with portraits of Arafat and Che Guevara than in the Green Party's federal headquarters. It's clear that conservative loudmouths like the head of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, are verbally freaking out about the sweater. But even within her own party, the Leverkusen native's attire is causing head-shaking. Konstantin von Notz, the deputy parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, wrote on X: The saying is "a completely subterranean, unacceptable, and insulting take for all police officers." A spokesperson for the Green Party's federal executive committee also criticized Nietzard. Since then, the young politician has shown insight: "Of course, I don't hate the police as a whole, but what I hate is the system behind it and how it's currently structured." According to one count , at least 371 people have been killed by German police bullets since the annexation of the GDR to the Federal Republic.

Nietzard has led the Green Youth together with Jakob Blasel since October 2024. Since then, right-wing politicians and journalists have regularly targeted them. In March, for example, "Bild" scandalized a guest article by the young politicians on "Watson." They were particularly bothered by this sentence: "Why should women stay in heterosexual relationships with men if they have 30 percent fewer orgasms?" At the beginning of the year, a post on X triggered headlines. It read: "Men who lose their hand while setting off fireworks can at least no longer hit women." And AfD politician Fabian Küble insulted the former student at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin for sitting by a lake in a bikini. "Left-wing women who call themselves feminists accuse men of sexualizing them and then post things like that at the same time."

Young women who confidently talk about female sexuality, racism, and patriarchal social structures have always been enemies of the right. After all, women are supposed to raise children, have fried potatoes ready for their husbands by 7 p.m., and have sex whenever the men want it. Leftists must reject this understanding of roles—and therefore show solidarity with Nietzard. Even if they disagree with her actions and opinions.

While the slogan on Nietzard's sweater is causing a stir in political circles in Berlin, the "Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung" reports that internal proceedings against 14 police officers from Lower Saxony have concluded without consequences. The Göttingen Police Department stated that "no conduct that warrants disciplinary action" had been found. The officers were involved in an operation on Easter Saturday 2024 in Nienburg an der Weser, during which 46-year-old Gambian Lamin Touray was shot and killed by police . Hardly anyone noticed. Presumably, Rainer Wendt's fuss was too loud.