UPDATE - German minister slammed by Greens party colleagues
Date: 28-Mar-01
Country: GERMANY
Author: Clifford Coonan
The Bundestag lower house votes on Wednesday on a call by opposition conservatives for Trittin, a hardline left-winger in the ecologist party governing in coalition with the larger Social Democratic Party, to step down.
But Trittin said after meeting coalition colleagues that he was confident the coalition parties would back him.
"I got the impression from both parties in the coalition that no one was prepared to help the Christian Democrats in their efforts to bully someone out of government," Trittin told NTV television.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Monday criticised opposition calls for Trittin to quit as a "manhunt".
GREENS VOTE DOWN
Trittin's remarks early this month - which accused Christian Democrat general secretary Laurenz Meyer of having a "skinhead mentality" - cost votes in Rhineland-Palatinate, where the Greens barely scraped back into the state assembly.
They scored 5.2 percent in the state, down one percentage point and barely above the five-percent threshold required to gain seats under Germany's proportional representation system. Greens support also slipped by 1.5 percent in Baden-Wuerttemberg to 7.7 percent.
Greens parliamentary leader Kirsten Mueller said after the parliamentary party meeting that no individual politician could be blamed for the weekend's losses.
"The Greens will unanimously back Trittin. We need to show solidarity to be successful. We can only win back voters if we stand together and don't falter," Mueller said, adding that the party needed to make changes to win back voters.
Trittin has also been criticised in the past days for saying the controversial shipments of nuclear waste from France that resumed on Monday were a necessary part of his plan to phase out nuclear power by 2025.
A heavily-guarded train returning waste from France rumbled across Germany yesterday, protected by some 30,000 police and special forces against demonstrations by thousands of environmentalists.
Greens deputy Franziska Eichstaedt-Bohlig, who had been critical of Trittin, said the minister had been formally warned.
"He got the yellow card, but not the red card," she said.
