Do elections spell the end of Germany's "Green era?"
By Phil Hill
Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Green Party of Germany)

BERLIN 4 Oct. 2005: The sign on Hanger 2 of Berlin's legendary Tempelhof Airport still reads "Aviation Detachment, U.S. Army Berlin Brigade," but the building has long been a concert hall; on that night it was the site of the Greens' election-night party. How much beer crossed the bar would depend on the returns. Would the red-green coalition of the Greens with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) still be running Germany, as they had for seven years?

	New German Green co-spokesperson Renata Künast, German Agriculture and Consumer Affairs minister. Photo: frakenburger-viertel.de

The first exit polls answered with a no. Yet frenetic cheering indicated the beer would flow that night. Across town, at the offices of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the reaction was shell shock, and the champagne stayed corked, in spite of the defeat of the hated leftist government, in spite of the fact that the CDU was the country's biggest party again. 

Greens, like the SPD, were cheering because they had expected a multiple fracture and got away with a black eye.

Weeks later, although Germans knew seconds after the polls closed how they had voted, they still don't know who won. Schröder's red-green government has lost its majority, but Angela Merkel's conservative-liberal alliance didn't win one either. This was a major personal defeat for Merkel, who blew a 20-point lead in the polls to win only 35 percent, just one point more than Schröder. 

Under Germany's parliamentary system, the chancellor (akin to the British or Canadian prime minister) is elected by Parliament (the Bundestag) and hence needs the support of parties which together form a majority. Parties win seats according to their percentage of the vote, thus ensuring a multiparty parliament. At this writing, all possible solutions for a majority coalition have been ruled out. 

Holding the balance is the Left Party, a merger of the old East German ex-communists and a split-off from Schröder's SPD. Yet Schröder has pledged not to have anything to do with these heirs to the tyrannical eastern regime. Very likely, what he really hates are the "traitors" who left his own party. Still, he stresses, most Germans voted "left," i.e., against Merkel. 

Greens won a respectable 8.1 percent, a drop of four seats, but enough for 51 in the 614-seat Parliament. They will be the smallest of the five caucuses. Their most prominent leader, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, has announced that he will pull back from the front ranks of the party he led from the margins of society into government to pass on the torch to a new generation. He will retain his Bundestag seat, however, and will thus remain a major voice in the party. Smart money says we haven't heard the last of him.

	Fritz Kuhn

The Greens' most lasting achievement in government, pushed through by Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin, is the establishment of alternative energy as a central economic factor in this major country. The marriage of German engineering and German environmental consciousness has produced a wind-and-solar powerhouse that has transformed the domestic energy picture. Germany is now exporting alternative technology all over the world, phasing out nuclear power, bringing back recycling and strengthening conservation. 

New laws have improved the lot of immigrants and of refugees. Money has belatedly been pumped into the educational system and into support for poor children. Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Minister Renate Künast has pushed for organic farming and established consumer protections. And under Fischer's lead, Germany opposed the Iraq war, supported the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union, and assumed world leadership in the fight against global warming. Germany, under Green co-rule, has played a major role in formulating a European answer to Bush's vision of an endless "war on terror" by addressing the world's real problems, such as poverty and the environmental crisis.

The downside has been the stagnant economy and a crisis of the social-support system. The last three years were spent in cutback mode, which boosted support for the Left Party. Now, the SPD and the Greens agree, they have to fine-tune the transformation and correct its mistakes. The key to that is a reformed and consolidated social/old age/health system called citizens' insurance, a concept developed by the Greens and adopted by the SPD.

Merkel ran on an opposite vision, one all too familiar to Americans: ever more cutbacks, privatization of social systems and tax cuts for the rich. And the CDU and its liberal would-be partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), agree that ecology is an unaffordable luxury in tight budget times.

Originally, the parliamentary arithmetic strongly suggested a coalition of Greens, the FDP and one of the big parties. However, the FDP refused to talk with the SPD. Green leaders Reinhard Bütikofer and Claudia Roth then seized the opportunity to look reasonable by comparison and sat down with Merkel. But, not surprisingly, they found little basis for agreement and broke off the effort.

That made a grand coalition of Schröder's SPD and Merkel's CDU the likely alternative, an option with a major hurdle: both claimed to have won on election night and therefore to be the rightful chancellor in such a coalition. In fact, both had lost, so the two parties were deadlocked. In early October the CDU demanded that the SPD surrender and accept Merkel. When the SPD refused, Merkel broke off the talks.

The only remaining option, a three-party SPD-Left-Green coalition, is a mathematical but not a political possibility, since both the SPD and the Left Party reject it outright; only the Green Youth actively support it. The result is political gridlock. If no deal is struck by the time the Bundestag meets on Oct. 18, the Parliament must try to elect a chancellor and will eventually get to the point where, under the constitution, a plurality vote will suffice. Merkel hopes to win such a vote, since her party plus the FDP have more seats than the SPD plus the Greens. But if only 16 of 54 Left representatives decide that Schröder is a lesser evil, he could win that vote. Then it would be up to Merkel to either knuckle under and support the duly elected chancellor or force new elections, currently the most likely outcome.

Until the crisis is resolved, Fischer and Trittin will be staying on the job, albeit on borrowed time. Künast has already cleaned out her desk, having been elected co-chair of the Greens' Bundestag Group, beating out Trittin. Joining her in the gender-parity job is Fritz Kuhn. The two supposedly represent the party's two wings, Kuhn being one of Fischer's "Realos" and Künast coming from leftist-dominated Berlin. In fact, both are moderates in intra-party terms, and their election holds promise that the factional hatchet may have been buried. Then the party can unite around the issues, primarily the citizen's insurance concept and a new "away from oil" campaign. It will be pushing from the opposition benches as it prepares for its next big entry in four years.

Phil Hill is a former Green organizer from the United States who now makes his home in Germany and is active with Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. Contact the party at www.gruene.de. 

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