BERLIN — Two months ago, Claudia Stamm, a Green lawmaker in the Bavarian state parliament, got so fed up with the party that she quit as a member. She's not the only one unimpressed by the Greens — ahead of Germany's general election in September, polls show many voters feel the same way.

After eight years in the Bavarian legislature, the 46-year-old caused a shock in Munich by announcing that she would leave the Greens, isolating herself at the edge of the parliament, where she now sits on her own.

“It’s become completely unclear what the Greens stand for,” Stamm told POLITICO. “On some issues, the party's position has become so blurry it’s unrecognizable, while on other issues, you can find the completely opposite positions within the same, relatively small party.”

Although Stamm's departure is an extreme example, it highlights the identity crisis faced by the Greens, who made an astonishing journey from environmental protest movement to partner in national government before enduring their current woes.

Down in the polls ahead of the parliamentary election, the Greens are struggling, more than any other party in Germany, to distinguish themselves from the rest of the political spectrum.

“None of the traditional Green topics is at the center of public attention anymore,” said Hubert Kleinert, who was one of the first Green members in the German parliament between 1983 and 1986 and is now a professor of social science at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden.

It's not just that some of the core positions the party used to stand for, such as campaigning for the phase-out of nuclear power, have become part of the consensus among Germany’s political mainstream, Kleinert said. The party has also been forced onto the defensive when it comes to what once was its strongest asset — its role as an advocate for multiculturalism.

Despite their low poll rating, the Greens could still play a decisive role in the fall.

Years ago, the Greens could still score points among voters by promoting an open-border society. But in the aftermath of events like the 2016 Christmas market attack in the German capital, when a Tunisian who entered the country as an asylum seeker killed 12 people, they're now busy defending that position in an increasingly hostile political climate.

Add a lack of charismatic new faces to the mix, and you end up with a party that is polling at between 7 and 8 percent, less than half their score even last summer, and could fail to clear the 5 percent hurdle to enter the German parliament.

Protest to power

Founded in 1980 to protest the political establishment, the Greens became a part of that establishment a long time ago, governing Germany as the junior partner in a Social Democrat-led coalition between 1998 and 2005.

The Greens' original supporters from back in the day have left their rebellious student years behind and turned into high-earning, middle-class intellectuals.

The party has changed along with them over the years, and many have remained loyal to it. The Greens' main problem, however, is mobilizing new voters. It didn’t help, critics say, that in January the party picked two long-established top officials, who are known for being rather pragmatic, as their top candidates for the federal campaign.

Both Katrin Göring-Eckart, a respected 51-year-old lifelong politician, and Cem Özdemir, a 51-year-old social worker, are popular within the party. Özdemir, the German-born son of two Turkish immigrants, was widely applauded last year when he criticized Angela Merkel’s government for being too soft on Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But both have been members of the German parliament for around two decades, and critics doubt they can attract new voters.

Green zone

But the decline of the Greens can't only be chalked up to the personalities of its leaders. It is rooted in their policies and the environmental issues on which they have chosen to run their 2017 campaign.

Their program, according to a draft of the manifesto released in March, includes abolishing all combustion engines in cars by 2030 and phasing out coal power. But while voters still care about these issues, they are far more interested in topics such as refugees and domestic security, surveys show.

Both are weak spots for the Greens, who have consistently failed to come up with a viable message on either issue.

More than a third of all Germans believe that the Greens' current crisis in polls is rooted in the party "having no solutions for important topics like refugee policy or fighting terror," according to a recent YouGov survey.

This is partly due to conflicting signals the party sends out, analysts say.

While the Greens' national leaders, for instance, continue to warn of the risks of deporting refugees back to crisis-ridden Afghanistan, the Green-led state government in wealthy Baden-Württemberg has a track record of sending rejected asylum seekers back to Kabul.

The party has also garbled its message on dual citizenship, a long-contentious issue in Germany.

“First, the Greens here in Bavaria attacked the conservatives for demanding to do away with it," said Stamm, who now plans to found a new party. "And then, 10 days later, the Greens’ own top candidate called it into question.”

Potential kingmaker

Despite their low poll rating, the Greens could still play a decisive role in the fall.

Currently, the most likely outcome of the national election in September is another grand coalition of Chancellor Merkel's conservative bloc with the Social Democrats (SPD).

However, as the SPD and their candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, trail behind Merkel's conservatives by around 10 percentage points, another possible scenario is a three-party alliance in which the chancellor's bloc, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens share power.

For many in the party, such a coalition with the conservatives and the liberals, once considered unthinkable, has become an acceptable option — but only, that is, if the Greens can rally enough votes to make them a viable partner in the first place.

Not 'hot sh-t'

Facing their decline in polls, Green party leaders have been eager to show they know they need to sharpen up their act.

In April, following a defeat in a state election, top candidate Göring-Eckardt acknowledged publicly that "apparently ... the topics [we're campaigning on] are not being perceived as the 'hot sh-t' of the republic."

The party's draft manifesto, which still needs to be formally adopted, is supposed to change that by laying out, for example, how to boost security without hollowing out individual freedoms.

Staying vague on the details, the party demands more police officers while stressing that "a strong state under the rule of law" should be committed to protecting civil liberties.

Similarly, when it comes to refugees, the Greens have taken a harsher tone, saying "not everyone who comes to us can stay" — but also promising to "defend the fundamental right of asylum with determination."

Caught between two camps

It's an "on the one hand, on the other hand" strategy that seems unlikely to win over voters, critics say.

That's where Winfried Kretschmann wants to prove them wrong.

"[The Greens] want to govern but they don’t want to deal with what comes with that responsibility" — Professor Hubert Kleinert

The 69-year-old leader of Baden-Württemberg is the Greens' only state premier, who managed to score an unprecedented 30.3 percent of the vote in a regional election last year. Many now hope he will help the party surge in national polls.

Kretschmann will be increasingly visible on the campaign trail — something not everyone in the party is happy about.

The premier, who campaigned on endorsing Merkel's refugee policy, is seen as a prime example of how conformist the former protest party has become. The more radical wing of the party, which believes such pragmatism will make the Greens indistinguishable from other parties, has promised to keep up the fight for its own positions.

That conflict strikes at the heart of the party's dilemma, analysts say.

“The Greens constantly want to square the circle," said Kleinert. "They want to govern but they don’t want to deal with what comes with that responsibility. They want to remain morally clean, but at the same time, they want power.”