{news} Fw: USGP-INT Greens still exercise power in Germany, despite 2004 election results (Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation)

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: <usgp-media at gp-us.org>; <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2006 9:55 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Greens still exercise power in Germany, despite 2004 
election results (Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation)


> Green Power
>
> By Mark Hertsgaard
> The Nation, posted January 11, 2006 (January 30,
> 2006 issue)
> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/hertsgaard
>
>
> Last fall's elections in Germany knocked the
> Green Party out of the government but not, it
> seems, out of power. From 1998 to 2005, the
> Greens had helped govern Germany as the junior
> partner in a red-green coalition led by the
> Social Democratic Party. Following inconclusive
> elections this past September, the red-green
> government was replaced by a so-called grand
> coalition between the SPD and an alliance of two
> conservative parties, the Christian Democratic
> Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union,
> headed by Angela Merkel. The Greens were left
> out. Yet their influence on public policy
> persists, as illustrated by one of the first
> actions Merkel took as Chancellor.
>
> Embracing a green jobs program the Greens had
> long championed, Merkel decreed that from now on
> 5 percent of all pre-1978 German housing would be
> made energy efficient every year. Toward that
> end, the government will spend 1.5 billion euros
> a year subsidizing the installation of more
> efficient insulation, heating and electricity
> systems in houses and apartment buildings across
> the nation. That is a major outlay of money,
> especially considering widespread calls to trim
> Germany's budget deficit, but the program is seen
> as a win-win-win. The 1.5 billion euros will be
> recouped through lower energy bills. Lower energy
> use will mean less air pollution and lower
> greenhouse gas emissions. And, most important of
> all for a nation fighting double-digit rates of
> unemployment, the efficiency upgrades will create
> thousands of jobs that cannot be outsourced
> overseas. Because efficiency renovations are
> highly labor-intensive and by their nature
> localized, the program will provide jobs for
> countless German carpenters, electricians and
> other construction workers. Since much of
> Germany's pre-1978 housing is located in the
> former East Germany, most of the new jobs will be
> created there, where unemployment and the social
> tensions it fosters are greatest.
>
> "The new government is clearly following our
> lead," says Reinhard Bütikofer, Green Party
> chair. "This will not only strengthen climate
> policy but create many new jobs. We in fact
> started that program while in the [red-green]
> government, and we had to defend it a couple of
> times against the SPD finance minister."
>
> Twenty-five years after their founding, the
> German Greens remain without question the most
> influential environmentally based party ever.
> They have exercised decisive effect not only on
> government policy but on the underlying terrain
> of social values and beliefs that shape policy,
> and they have done so both at home and abroad.
> During the 2005 election campaign, recalls Patrik
> Schwarz of the German weekly Die Zeit, who has
> written extensively about the party, "the Greens
> would say, half-jokingly, that if they had not
> helped to usher in changes in German politics and
> society over the past twenty years, you never
> would have seen a woman [Merkel] heading the CDU
> ticket or an openly gay man [Guido Westerwelle]
> leading the [business-based] Free Democratic
> Party." One month after Merkel's announcement,
> the European Bank for Reconstruction and
> Development also copied the Greens when its
> president, Jean Lemierre, announced that Eastern
> European countries would have to improve their
> energy efficiency in order to continue receiving
> loans.
>
> During their years governing the world's
> third-biggest economy, the Greens also showed
> they could be trusted with the reins of power
> without losing their edge. They demanded and won
> an internationally unprecedented phaseout of
> nuclear power--nineteen reactors, which supply 30
> percent of Germany's electricity, are scheduled
> to close by 2020--and made up the shortfall by
> sponsoring a renewable energy sources law that
> has already doubled German production of solar,
> wind and other renewable energies and is
> projected to raise their share of German energy
> consumption to 65 percent by 2050. Under the
> leadership of the party's most popular figure,
> Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Greens
> transformed Germany's foreign policy and global
> image, leaving behind their own historical
> pacifism and the nation's historically reflexive
> pro-Americanism. Fischer enraged both the Greens'
> left wing, by supporting international
> peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and
> Afghanistan, and the Bush Administration, by
> leading European resistance to the Iraq War.
>
> But if the Greens are so clever, why were they
> voted out last September? Bütikofer insists
> the defeat wasn't the Greens' fault, and the data
> support him. Since joining the government in
> 1998, the Greens have increased their share of
> the vote in national elections from 6.7 percent
> to 8.1 percent. It was the decline of former
> Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's SPD, whose
> support fell from 40.9 to 34.2 percent over the
> past seven years thanks to a failure to conquer
> Germany's unemployment crisis, that doomed the
> red-green government. In the lead-up to the
> election, polls showed the SPD trailing the CDU
> by as much as twenty points. Thus, says Schwarz,
> "The Greens didn't have the functional argument
> going for them this election. They couldn't
> campaign saying, 'Vote Green and you'll get a
> red-green government.'"
>
> Looking forward, the Greens face the challenge of
> replacing Fischer (who announced his retirement
> from the party leadership) and, above all,
> sharpening their appeal on economic issues. "Ask
> Germans which party is the most competent on
> consumer or energy or especially environmental
> issues, and it's the Greens," says party chair
> Bütikofer. "But on the economy we're not
> respected a lot, so that's where we have to do
> the most work."
>
> The Greens are, after all, implicated in the
> economic shortcomings of the red-green
> government, whose reform of Germany's social
> welfare state went too far for many on the left
> but not far enough for business and others on the
> right. (The new Left Party capitalized on
> workers' dissatisfactions with the red-green
> reforms to win 8.7 percent of the 2005 vote,
> nosing ahead of the Greens.) Arguing that wealth
> cannot be distributed unless it is first created,
> the Greens now present themselves as the party of
> market-friendly modernizations. "We must find
> answers to globalization, to independence from
> oil, to integration of foreigners" into German
> society, says Renate Künast, the new
> co-leader of the party's parliamentary faction.
> "We don't want to leave this up to the market
> alone, because the market follows and rewards
> only the interests of shareholders. The
> government must set rules...so that a worker is
> not just a pawn in the game of economic
> interests. That is modern left politics."
>
> The green jobs program that Chancellor Merkel
> borrowed from the Greens is a key example of the
> larger argument the Greens will continue to push,
> says Bütikofer--that "what has traditionally
> been called 'industrial policy' should instead be
> renamed and pursued as 'environmental policy.'"
> The Greens' Renewable Energy Sources law likewise
> "sent the message that ecological innovation and
> jobs go together," Bütikofer adds. The
> renewable energy industry now employs 130,000
> workers in Germany. Because parts of the law on
> renewables have since been copied by forty-one
> other nations, including China, German exports of
> renewable energy technology should grow, yielding
> even more jobs in the future.
>
> At age twenty-five the Greens have left behind
> their militant past to become a center-left
> party; Green leaders speak as critically of the
> alleged "demagoguery" of the Left Party as they
> do of the "market radicalism" of the right-wing
> Free Democratic Party. Much of what the party has
> accomplished at home is not transferable to
> countries with nonparliamentary electoral
> systems; in the winner-take-all United States,
> getting 8 percent of the vote is a ticket to
> nowhere. But Germany is rich and powerful enough
> that its actions have a global effect. In the
> past seven years the Greens seeded a worldwide
> renewable energy revolution while helping to
> weaken the Bush Administration's drive to war in
> Iraq. Those are impressive achievements, and if
> the party can further find its voice on economic
> matters, they could be just the beginning.