Greens change direction on road to power

As she surveyed her modest audience in the market square of Eberswalde, Ms Sylvia Voss, a Green candidate for the eastern state of Brandenburg, was getting desperate. She had come to the end of her own speech but the main speaker had not yet arrived.

So she began to reel off her activities to promote peace and save the environment, working herself up to a pitch of excitement as she declared: "And I've also done a lot for the American Indians."

Brandenburg is not noted for its welcoming attitude towards foreigners and a Native American visiting Germany would do well to steer clear of Eberswalde, especially after dark. But it has long been part of the refreshing charm of the Greens to say the right thing in the most unlikely place, even if it sometimes alienates voters.

Founded as a loose coalition of environmentalists, Trotskyites and radicals, the Greens became the voice of Germany's anti-nuclear, anti-American, anti-establishment youth during the 1980s.

The charismatic Petra Kelly was a new kind of political leader who preached a fresh political gospel that stood in stark contrast to the traditional parties' appeals to narrow self-interest. But the party soon found itself torn apart by bitter feuds over ideological purity and lost all its seats in the Bundestag in 1990.

"Our principles have not changed. What has changed is that our basic strategic conflict has been decided: in favour of becoming a reforming party rather than pure opposition to the system. This decision nearly killed us," according to Mr Joshka Fischer, the Greens' parliamentary leader who came to Ms Voss's rescue in Eberswalde.

Mr Fischer, who wore jeans and sneakers on his first day in the Bundestag in 1983, is now one of Germany's top parliamentary performers and his party's most successful vote-winner.

His speech in Eberswalde was one of more than 200 he has made during the election campaign, transfixing his audiences with a horror vision of the future, only to reassure them that they can still create a new, harmonious world of social justice and environmental responsibility.

Mr Fischer's foreign policy expertise is undisputed and has even won praise from Germany's former foreign minister, Dr Hans Dietrich Genscher. The Greens are committed to deeper political and economic integration in Europe and to maintaining Germany's place in the western alliance.

The Greens now share power in five of Germany's 16 federal states and their support at national level is comfortably above the 5 per cent needed to win seats in the Bundestag. This places the party in the enviable position of being the only possible coalition partners for the opposition Social Democrats - leaving aside the option of a grand coalition with Chancellor Kohl's Christian Democrats.

Despite the political arithmetic, there is little love lost between the leaders of the main opposition parties, and Social Democrats fear some Green policies will encourage wavering voters to stick with Dr Kohl.

They cite the Green commitment to cut the German army in half and eventually dissolve NATO as evidence that the environmentalists have still not grown up. Industrialists and trade unionists are united in their outrage at Green proposals to triple the price of petrol by 2008 and to encourage Germans to take fewer holidays abroad. And leading Social Democrats are more comfortable with tough conservative policies on immigration and law and order than with the Greens' ambition to create a kinder, more open Germany.

"They don't actually like the Greens. I'd even go so far as to say they might hate us," according to the Green chairman, Mr Jurgen Trittin. "But their problem is not whether they like us but how they are to become chancellor. It's purely a question of power."