ANALYSIS - German Greens shed pacifism in bid to keep power
Date: 19-Mar-02
Country: GERMANY
Author: David Crossland
Four years in government, during which the Greens sparked two political crises with their reluctance to agree to Germany's first foreign combat missions since World War Two, have dented their credibility with many voters, both pacifist and mainstream.
The party, junior partner in the ruling coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats, has its roots in the peace movement and the 1968 student protests.
It effectively struck pacifism off its agenda of core principles at the congress, which approved a motion that the use of force could not be ruled out as a last resort to combat genocide and terrorism.
The move merely sealed on paper a painful transformation that the Greens have undergone in practice, led by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, one of Germany's most popular politicians and the party's biggest electoral asset.
Fischer persuaded them to drop fierce opposition to Germany committing troops to NATO's 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign and to the U.S.-led war on terrorism, averting a government collapse by arguing the Greens could achieve more in power than outside.
But shedding pacifism does not solve the party's quandary. By accepting the use of force to become more palatable to the broad mass of voters, it has disillusioned many of its highly educated, traditional supporters.
LOST CORE VOTE?
Commentators say even Fischer, who has transformed himself from stone-throwing street protester to statesman, may be unable to reverse its fortunes after a string of local election defeats and poor opinion poll results.
"As a traditional party of opposition, the Greens have had a tough time explaining their government role to their core supporters. They have alienated a lot of their voters and must now find a way to mobilise them," said Dieter Roth, director at the Electoral Research Group, a leading polling institute.
They risk losing the peace vote to the reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which has consistently opposed German military involvement.
The PDS stance, reaffirmed at its separate weekend congress, helped win the PDS enough votes to enter the Berlin city government after a regional election last October.
Unless they improve their poll ratings of between five and six percent, and overtake the pro-business liberal Free Democrats (FDP), the Greens may not be able to form a new government with Schroeder, who could prefer an alliance with a party which gives him a bigger majority.
GREENS TAMED
"The Greens have given up pacifism and thereby become more peaceful," wrote the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "Now they are realising they have achieved complete manoeuvrability at a time when it no longer guarantees electoral success."
The Greens have become victims of their own success in the two decades since they emerged as a movement of scruffy rebels bent on making a conservative industrial society more environmentally friendly and tolerant.
They have helped to make the water cleaner and the air purer and have forced power companies to phase out nuclear energy. Voters may feel that the project the Greens embarked on is more or less complete, so why vote for them again?
In addition, rising unemployment has turned many Germans off Green policies like fuel tax increases to reduce traffic.
Young voters are switching from the Greens to the FDP and conservatives, said Bernhard Wessels, political scientist at Berlin's Free University.
"Young people are more worried about getting a job these days, they don't have the luxury to care about the environment," Wessels said.
Few dispute that this small party, which won 6.7 percent of the vote in 1998, has delivered on its main election promises. Apart from quitting nuclear power, they gave homosexuals the right to marry and made it possible for thousands of foreigners to gain German citizenship.
"We have changed the republic step by step," Kerstin Mueller, co-leader of the Gr
