{news} Fw: USGP-INT Report on Greens and the German Election, by Phil Hill

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Feinstein" <mfeinstein at feinstein.org>
To: <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:08 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Report on Greens and the German Election, by Phil Hill


 Dear all

 Here is a post-election report on the Greens and the German Election, by
  Phil Hill.

 Phil is a long-time Green who was born and raised in the U.S., but who
 has been living in German for much of the last 15 years.

 Phil was active in the early years of the U.S. Greens, and since he has
 been living in Germany, he has been also very active with the German 
Greens.

 A condensed version of this article will appear in the upcoming issue of
 Green Pages, the national newsletter of the Green Party of the United
 States.

 ---------------------------------------------------------

 Do Elections Spell the End of Germany’s “Green Era?”
 Phil Hill, Berlin, Sept. 20, 2005

 September 18th, Hanger 2 of Berlin’s legendary Tempelhof Airport – the
 sign still reads “Aviation Detachment, US Army Berlin Brigade,” but it’s
 long been a concert hall. Tonight, it’s been rented by the Greens, for
 their election-night party. How much beer crosses the bar will depend on
 the returns: Will the “Red-Green” government – the Greens’ coalition
 with Chancellor Schröder’s Social Democrats (SPD) – still be running
 Germany after tonight, as they have for seven years?

 At 6 p.m., as the polls close and the TV station is free to reveal
 exit-poll information, the beamer puts the answer on the screen: a clear
 “no.” And yet the hall erupts in frenetic cheering. Across town on
 Berlin’s embassy row, the conservative CDU’s reaction is something akin
 to shell-shock, in spite of the hated leftist government’s defeat, in
 spite of the fact that they are the country’s biggest party again.

 For much worse – or, from the CDU’s point of view, better – had been
 expected. The SPD’s 34% was about what the latest polls had predicted,
 after a last-minute spurt. But the CDU, led by Angela Merkel, did only 1
 point better; three months earlier, the gap had been 20%. Some of that
 had been lost to her Liberal would-be junior partners, the FDP, but
 Schröder had picked up enough to create a deadlock between the two
 “camps.” Holding the balance was the Left Party (see box). Thus, for the
 third time in a row, Germany had voted left – but will not, apparently
 have a left-green coalition. For Schröder has pledged not to have
 anything to do with the heirs to the tyrannical eastern regime.

 The Greens got a respectable 8.1% – a slight drop. That was heartening,
 for the party’s steady long-term growth had partially offset the
 defection of leftists who were angry over social cutbacks imposed by the
 Schröder government. In the 600-seat parliament, the Greens will have 51
 seats, a drop of five, and will be the smallest of the five caucuses.

 The deadlock meant that patching together a coalition (see box) will be
 difficult. For the Greens, that probably means no participation in
 government, since no one will cooperate with the Left Party, and the
 only other possibilities involve cooperation with the liberal FDP, which
is so militantly anti-ecological that such a deal is hard to imagine.
 Two days after the election, the Greens’ most prominent leader, Foreign
 Minister Joschka Fischer, announced that if that if the party dropped
 out of the government, he’d withdraw from the leadership and “pass the
 baton” on to the next generation.

 He and his party have plenty of accomplishments, but also plenty of
 headaches to show for their seven years in government.

 The most lasting, pushed through by Green Environment Minister Jürgen 
Trittin,
 is the establishment of alternative energy as a central economic factor
 in one of the world’s most economically important countries. The
 marriage of German engineering with German environmental consciousness
 has produced a wind-and-solar powerhouse that has transformed the
 country’s energy picture, and is now exporting alternative technology
 all over the world. Nuclear power is being phased out, recycling has
 been brought back, and conservation strengthened. Germany now has a
 reformed citizenship law which improves the lot of millions of immigrant
 workers, including many Turks, and of refugees. Recently, money has,
 belatedly, been pumped into the educational system and into support for
 poor and working-class children. Agriculture and Consumer Affairs
 Minister Renate Künast has pushed organic agriculture and healthy school
 lunches, while establishing consumer protection at the cabinet level for
 the first time. And under Fischer, Germany’s foreign policy has been
 oriented toward peace in the Middle East – including, of course,
 opposition to the Iraq War, and integration of eastern Europe into the
 European Union. Together, Fischer and Trittin have made Germany the
 world leader in fighting global warming under the Kyoto Protocol. If
George W. Bush represents a vision of endless war “against terror” and
 ignoring the world’s real problems, Germany, under Green co-rule, has
 been the most important force working for an opposite vision.

 The down side has been the stagnant economy, and the crisis of the
 social system. The last three years were spent in cut-back mode, stage
 one of a restructuring of Germany’s multifaceted social-support system,
 which has been suffering, too, from demographic change: Designed in
 imperial times for a growing population that worked in big factories and
 died a few years after retiring (or before that, in some war), it needs
 restructuring to deal with a graying society moving toward gender
 equality and patchwork careers with outsourcing, part-time and
 computerization. Stage two, coming up, will have to involve ensuring
 that those whose needs have fallen behind in the old system, or else
 been unjustly neglected in the transition, are met.

 That’s what this election was about: The “red-green” government ran on a
 platform of fine-tuning the transformation, correcting the mistakes
 they’d made, and building a socially just and ecological society; the
 conservative-liberal opposition envisioned ever more cut-backs,
 privatization of the social systems, and more tax-cuts for the rich – to
 “create jobs,” of course. Neither side won; the Left Party, claiming
 both camps were bleeding the poor, won enough seats to block either
 grouping.

 The result is a battle of nerves, since the “grand coalition” – a
 marriage of the two big parties, the solution most observers expected –
 is stymied by the fact that both Schröder and Angela Merkel want to be
 chancellor. After pulling his party back from the brink of a historic
 catastrophe, Schröder is claiming to have won the election, and points
 out that he is far more popular than Merkel, so that only he would be
 able to unite the country. The CDU rejects that out of hand, claiming
 that, with more seats, they have a right to pick the chancellor. So
 other solutions are being floated:

 ∑ A “traffic-light” coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Liberals
 (yellow); no way, says Liberal boss Guido Westerwelle, I’m not bailing
 out this failed leftist gang.

 ∑ A “Jamaican coalition” (CDU-FDP-Greens; so-called because only the
 land of reggae has a black – the CDU color – yellow and green flag): The
 Green attitude is, we’ll talk to anybody, but don’t bet on it – and
 Fischer will have no part of it.

 ∑ And failing all of them, there’s the possibility of some kind of
 red-green minority government, which would still have to depend on some
 level of support from the Left Party. Such a situation would be
 unstable, and could only be a transitional government until new
 elections are held.

 Schröder is banking on winning a deadlock in the coming weeks because
 his party is united behind him, while Merkel is widely seen as having
 snatched defeat from the jaws of victory through a singularly inept
 campaign. A physicist from East Germany who only entered politics with
 the overthrow of the regime, Angela Merkel was swept to the top of the
 party by a corruption scandal which tainted many west German state party
 bosses, and by the defeat of Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber in the 2002
 election. Many of those bosses of the thoroughly west German, and still
 heavily Catholic, CDU (see box) are now hoping that this childless
 career woman, a product of the communist East and from a state –
 Mecklenburg – almost devoid of Catholics, will not last long as their
 leader. The knives, rumor has it, are already being sharpened.

 But they are holding back, for tactical reasons. Soon after the
 election, they gave her a “vote of confidence” by re-electing her as
 head of their Bundestag caucus. But the almost unanimous vote may
 actually have been the first step toward dumping her, for the party’s
 floor leader is, of course, never also the chancellor.

 At a local chapter meeting in Pankow, the Greens’ East Berlin stronghold
 overlooking the government district, the mood was resigned two days
 after the vote – but there was satisfaction at having done well, both
 during the past seven years and during the campaign. The Greens will
 discuss coalitions with the other parties, outgoing Bundestag member
 Werner Schulz reported, on the basis of a list of concrete demands that
 are still being worked out. But there’s not much hope that they’ll be
 accepted by the Liberals and Conservatives. The likeliest result, most
 agreed, is a coalition of the two big parties – without either Schröder
 or Merkel, who have both been discredited – followed by new elections in
 two years or so. Or a continued deadlock, and new elections next spring.

  Box:

 Germany’s electoral system is fundamentally different from that of the 
U.S.:

 ∑ It is a parliamentary system, which means that the legislature, the
 Bundestag, elects the head of government, the chancellor (equivalent to
 the British or Canadian prime minister), at the suggestion of the
 largely powerless president (equivalent of the British queen or Canadian
 governor-general). That suggestion reflects the results of the Bundestag
 election, which is what was held on Sept. 18th. In Germany, no party has
 ever won an absolute majority in a free election, so that a would-be
 chancellor has to patch together a coalition of parties which together
 have a majority. After the 1998 and 2002 elections, the SPD and the
 Greens were able to form a majority under the leadership of Schröder and
 Fischer.

 Under this system, the legislature can be dissolved before its term is
 up, and early elections can be called. This happened this year; this
 election was a year early.

 ∑ The election is by proportional representation, which means that
 voters vote for parties, which then have seats assigned to them in
 proportion to the votes they receive in each of the country’s 16 states.
 However, a party has to receive 5% nationwide to get any seats at all.
 The country is also divided into 300 districts, where representatives
 are elected as in the US, but the seats won in the districts are then
 subtracted from the number of seats won through the proportional lists.
 There is only one district (in Berlin) which the Greens win via the
 district vote; all the rest are won via the proportional lists.

 ∑ Germany has five major political parties:

 o The Christian Democrats (CDU): Originally the party of moderate
 Catholics, it became the main conservative force after World War II, and
 ruled the country between 1949 and 1969, and again from 1982 until 1998,
 as the voice both of business and the conservative middle classes,
 usually in coalition with the FDP. In Bavaria, the local “CSU” is
 formally a separate party; both together usually win 35 to 40%; this
 time, it was 35%.

 o The Social Democrats (SPD) have a long and heroic history of fighting
 for democracy and workers’ rights; the SPD is tied to the unions, but
 has become somewhat crusty and stogy. It ruled the country during the
‘20s and the ‘70s in coalition with the Liberals and, sometimes, the
 CDU; since 1998, it has ruled with the Greens. It has usually won around
the same as the CDU, or a little less; this time, it scored 34%

 o The Free Democrats (FDP), Germany’s liberal party. With no
 working-class base, its social liberalism is paired with a fervent
 ideological capitalism that has become more strident in recent years.
 Once, it could play “king-maker” between the two bigger parties, but
 those days ended with the appearance of …

 o The Greens, founded in 1980, and expanded in the early ‘90s by a
 merger with the dissidents who had led the overthrow of the East German
 regime; since then, it is officially known as “Alliance ‘90/The Greens.”
 Both these parties have tended to poll between 5 and 10% of the vote;
 this time, the Greens got 8% and the FDP almost 10%.

 o The Left Party was originally the East German Communist Party, which
 changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in 1989, and
 has become the voice of both the East German loyalists and of many
 “losers of reunification.” Its new name is a step in the process of
 merger with a group of dissident SPDers under the leadership of former
 SPD chair Oskar Lafontaine. That expansion has thus for the first time
 won it  significant support in West Germany, boosting it to 8_%, as
 opposed to its traditional 5% or so.

 o The only other groups of any size are the various right-wing
 nationalists and neo-Nazis, the largest of which, the NPD, seems to be
 consolidating the others behind itself. It slightly increased its vote
 to almost 2% in this election.