The hippy image is history as the Greens sit in coalition in a quarter of all states, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
WHEN THE ocean plates shifted off the Japanese coast last month, no one could have guessed it would alter the political plate tectonics nearly 10,000km away in Germany.
Yet when eight million people went to the polls in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg last weekend, they did something they had never done before.
For the first time since the foundation of the state half a century ago, voters from Stuttgart to the Black Forest ousted the Christian Democrats (CDU) from power.
With Fukushima fears fresh in their thoughts, voters threw their support behind the original anti-nuclear Green Party and punished the CDU for renewing its commitment to atomic energy last autumn. Even more surprisingly, the Green Party leapfrogged over the Social Democrats (SPD) to become the state’s second political force.
For the first time Germany’s Green Party will head a state government – and not just in any state. Baden-Württemberg is Germany’s economic engine as home to Porsche and Mercedes. It is also Germany’s most conservative state.
When the Greens emerged in 1979 from the environmental, anti-nuclear movement, it was the hard-working Swabians in Baden-Württemberg who laughed loudest and longest at what they saw as a bedraggled band of Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers.
For voters here to back the Greens, as a quarter of them did last Sunday, marks a revolutionary shift in perception.
“The first green state premier in Germany and in a leading state, too – that will change the Greens in a lasting way,” said Ralf Fücks, of the Green-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Some six years after the end of the SPD-Green coalition, he noticed the party slipping back into its comfortable, familiar role as an opposition party.
No more. A run of strong election results means a quarter of Germany’s 16 state governments are now coalitions with the Greens.
The party already has mayors in cities such as Tübingen and Freiburg with other significant wins in local elections in neighbouring Hesse last weekend. September’s state election in Berlin is next.
That this is no mere Green flash in the pan was clear in the modest, almost shocked reaction of the party’s front bench to Sunday’s vote. Party insiders are working furiously to avoid triumphalism and instead build party support organically.
“The party is experiencing much more incremental momentum than hype and that will bring them into more conservative track,” predicts Dr Ulrike Guérot, Berlin head of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“They can’t go on being the opposition outrage party, they have to get into running things and that will change the political landscape of Germany over time.”
Which leads to the burning question in Germany this week: do the Greens now qualify to be called a Volkspartei? Until now, that term has been reserved for the CDU and SPD, indicating a party large and mature enough to offer a political home to a broad range of views.
After three decades surviving on their environmental, left-wing, “fundi” voter base, the Greens are increasingly luring away young, urban conservative voters from the CDU.
What made Sunday so special was how, for the first time, the Greens wooed Stuttgart widows and Freiburg engineers, too – classic CDU voters.
It’s part of greater reshuffle going on in the German political landscape, comparable to how the newly formed Left Party is peeling away disappointed left-wing voters from the SPD.
The consequences are huge: Sunday’s election has revived speculation of a CDU-Green coalition after the next general election.
After the recent collapse of a CDU-Green administration in Hamburg, Angela Merkel has dismissed the notion of working with the Greens in Berlin as a “pipe dream”.
The ongoing meltdown of her Free Democratic Party (FDP) coalition partner might make her less picky after election day in 2013.
Until then, the new Green governor Winfried Kretschmann, a conservative, pragmatic “realo”, has a chance to prove his party’s ideology can be balanced with the responsibility of office – particularly on the nuclear issue.
Kretschmann knows he has to appease the suspicious fundamental party grassroots without disappointing the first-time Green voters who put him in power and who could just as easily disown him next time around. “I feel honour-bound to my country first; my party follows somewhere further back and my person is right at the end,” said Kretschmann in a remarkable acceptance speech – using a quote from CDU predecessor to demonstrate his honourable intentions.
Not everyone is convinced the Greens have hit the big time. An opinion poll out yesterday showed the party up five points nationally to 19 per cent – a good result but still 10 points behind the SPD.
Nevertheless, they are in a strong position to shape the country’s upcoming nuclear debate – and Stuttgart is an interesting laboratory for the next stage of Germany’s green political experiment.