http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/01/green_is_the_new_blackIt seems like an eternity ago, back at the height of the East-West conflict, when members of Germany's newest party, the Greens, indignantly marched into the staid Bundestag with their long flowing hair, ragtag dress, and acid-rain-withered pine trees over their shoulders. The year was 1983, the hodgepodge of activists fresh from street demonstrations against the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles in Cold War Europe. No one thought they'd be around for long.
Nearly 30 years later, not only have the Greens managed to hang around --
they're the lone German party looking healthy these days. The environmentalists are soaring at a time when Europe's economy is desperate; even in Germany, where the economy has picked up, there is frantic budget slashing. Polls gauge support for the Greens at 20 percent of voters, twice the proportion a year ago; it even threatens to outpoll the major parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), in the traditionally conservative stronghold of Baden-Württemberg, which is holding a crucial state election on March 27. This unexpected surge positions the Greens as kingmaker in a year packed with important regional votes -- and a shot at eventually returning to power in Berlin.
The Greens would say that it's a just reward for their success at transforming German political culture. They shook up a political landscape that was once content to dismiss environmentalism and "grassroots democracy" as unserious trifling. But however much
the Greens managed, in the past several decades,
to move Germany's political center -- toward leadership in combating global warming, an embrace of activist politics, and an openness in discussing multiculturalism, feminism, and gay rights -- there's also no denying that the party has itself changed at least as much as the country has.
Now, the Greens' post-materialism has a distinct economic component. "What used to be starry-eyed idealism can now turn a profit," Reinhard Bütikofer, a Green EU parliamentarian says,
referring to the economic potential of renewable energy, as well as the growth of the workforce by promoting women's equality and openness to immigration -- other original Green agenda items. The same goes, he says, for global warming, which, tree-hugging aside, will have calamitous repercussions for the economy.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
