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Greens, Germany’s other party on the rise
BERLIN, Oct 11, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – While Germany’s mainstream political
parties are floundering in the face of a right-wing populist onslaught, the
ecologist Greens are gaining in popularity and looking to capture once enemy
terrain.
Days ahead of Sunday’s Bavaria state polls, the one-time hippie anti-party
party faces a long unthinkable prospect: scoring big and then joining forces
with the arch-conservative CSU party in the wealthy Alpine state.
Polls there and nationally put the Greens at around 18 percent, making it
the second strongest force in Germany and in Bavaria, a decades-long CSU
fiefdom, far ahead of the dispirited centre-left Social Democrats (SPD).
Bavarian public television acknowledged this new reality and, in its only
pre-election TV debate, pitted the CSU state premier Markus Soeder against
the Greens candidate Ludwig Hartmann, not the SPD’s Natascha Kohnen.
The anti-immigration AfD party, which has surged nationwide in the past
three years, also looks to enter the Bavarian state assembly. It is polling
at around 10 percent while the CSU is expected to lose its absolute majority.
This would force the CSU, which promotes crucifixes on classroom walls, to
join forces with its traditional ideological foes, whose pioneers a
generation ago entered the national parliament flashing peace signs and
handing out flowers.
News site Spiegel Online said Bavarian politics show that, aside from the
AfD’s rise, there is a little-noticed “second revolution … the rise of the
Greens into a mainstream party”.
– Nappy-changing outdoors man –
In Bavaria, the Greens are popular in gentrified inner-city areas but also
among conservatives who feel passionate about preserving Alpine vistas.
Voting Green is no longer a cultural taboo for Bavaria’s Catholic rural
voters because they “can interpret nature conservation as safeguarding
creation and a humanitarian refugee policy as an expression of Christian
charity,” said political scientist Gero Neugebauer.
The Greens have profited from the weakness of Merkel’s coalition government
but also been energised by a charismatic new male-female leadership duo —
Robert Habeck, 49, and Annalena Baerbock, 37, both elected in January.
Under their leadership, the party — which scored just 8.9 percent in last
September’s elections — has sought to shed its image of moralising do-
gooders and started to tackle long-taboo subjects such as German cultural
identity and the loaded term “Heimat” (homeland).
The party is still pushing core Green issues, however, from organic
agriculture to protecting species diversity. Where other parties have flip-
flopped, on climate and immigration, the Greens have consistently fought for
clean energy and against the racist far right.
Die Welt daily has also noted the telegenic appeal of Habeck, an author who
cultivates the image of an easy-going intellectual, from Germany’s wind-swept
coastal north near Denmark.
Habeck, said the newspaper, “comes across as the prototypical Scandinavian
outdoors man who will change the kids’ nappies and handle the household but
also looks good chopping wood”.
– Greens the ‘new bourgeoisie’ –
The Greens were born out of the 1960s and 70s pacifist and anti-nuclear
protest movements, and joined by East German civil rights activists after the
1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
They first entered government in a 1998-2005 coalition under SPD
chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that ironically broke with Germany’s post-World
War II taboo and sent troops abroad, to Kosovo and then Afghanistan.
Another milestone on its march toward the centre came in 2011 when the
Greens’ Winfried Kretschmann became premier of industrial powerhouse state
Baden-Wuerttemberg, a post he still holds.
Over the years German society has adopted many Green values — millions
ride bicycles to work, buy organic, oppose GM crops and fracking, have solar
panels on their roofs and support gay marriage.
Merkel adopted the Greens’ signature policy when, after Japan’s 2011
Fukushima disaster, she decided to shutter Germany’s atomic power plants.
Her open-door policy for refugees was meanwhile cheered more by Greens than
her own often sceptical CDU rank-and-file.
After the last two elections, Merkel held exploratory coalition talks with
the Greens which in 2017 collapsed only because a third party, the pro-
business Free Democrats, pulled out.
Since that time, noted Spiegel Online, the Greens have steadily gained
support at the expense of the SPD and Merkel’s CDU.
“The Greens are not the new Social Democrats,” it said, “they are the new
bourgeoisie.”
BSS/AFP/RY/08:52 hrs