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Green Party Gains Power, But Loses Respect
In Germany, the environmental Green party has gained unprecedented power in the government, but now finds it is losing touch with the people, and with its own message.
By GSReport
Start Date: 3/10/99
Germany's Green Party, one of the world's best examples of a politically successful environmental movement, has run afoul of its own success. The party has gained unprecedented influence in the new government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Joschka Fischer, the chief strategist behind the Greens' rise to power, is now Germany's foreign minister; and another leading Green, Juergen Trittin, is now Germany's Environment Minister.
But the Greens, especially Trittin, are learning that their hard-won political positions cannot be maintained without wrenching compromise. No sooner was Schroeder's election assured last fall than Trittin set in motion a crusade to shut down all of Germany's nuclear power plants. Schroeder, however, soon heard from the power industry and forced Trittin to back off. After years of outspoken opposition to nuclear power, it came as a stinging blow to the left-leaning Trittin and his sympathizers.
Fischer has adapted more quickly than some of his compatriots to the new political reality. Speaking at a party convention on the weekend of March 6-7, he said that the Greens must learn how to govern with a mix of vision and pragmatism. But he sees trouble ahead for the party. "We have become boring in our visions, and we have great difficulties making practical politics," he said, according to a report in the Associated Press.
Once highly attractive to Germany's disenchanted, environmentally aware youth, the Greens leadership is graying and losing touch with a new generation of youth that has different aspirations and concerns. Today, many young adults in Germany are more concerned about jobs, personal income and the economy than about the environment. The Greens have only begun to discuss whether, and how, to address the "pocketbook issues" that have long been the province of more traditional parties.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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