Green Party of Germany

Green Party of Germany, German environmentalist political party. It first won representation at the national level in 1983, and from 1998 to 2005 it formed a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 2021 the Greens posted their best-ever performance in a federal election, claiming almost 15 percent of the vote.

The Green Party traces its origins to the student protest movement of the 1960s, the environmentalist movement of the 1970s, and the peace movement of the early 1980s. The focus of the environmentalist protest was nuclear power, and the movement was directed especially at German labour, businesses, and politicians, all of whom enthusiastically endorsed its use, particularly after the sharp rise in oil prices in 1973. With little public debate, plans were approved in the late 1970s to build a series of nuclear power plants that would supply much of Germany’s energy needs. Earlier, Green political groups had emerged at the local level, and in March 1979 in Frankfurt several groups formed the Alternative Political Union, the Greens (Sonstige Politische Vereinigung, Die Grünen). That year the first Green representative was elected to the state parliament of Bremen, and in January 1980 the party held a conference in Karlsruhe, where it officially formed itself as a federal party. Widespread opposition to the deployment of a new generation of nuclear missiles in West Germany sparked a nationwide peace movement that helped the Greens enter the national parliament in 1983 with 5.6 percent of the vote.

In the mid-1980s the party was torn by internal dissension between the realists (Realos), who favoured compromise and cooperation with the SPD, and the fundamentalists (Fundis), who rejected compromise. In 1985 the Greens entered a coalition government with the SPD in Hesse, and by the end of the 1980s the realists were clearly in ascendancy.

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In the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, the Greens captured 8.3 percent of the vote in 1987. In 1989 a Green Party opposed to reunification was established in East Germany. For the 1990 elections, the first all-German elections since the 1930s, the East German Greens joined with Alliance ’90, a coalition of various grassroots organizations, and won representation in the German national legislature. Meanwhile, the West German Greens could not secure the minimum 5 percent of the national vote and were thus excluded from parliament. In January 1993 the two parties agreed to merge as Alliance ’90/The Greens. In 1994 the party secured national representation, and in 1998 it assumed national political power as a junior coalition partner in the government headed by SPD leader Gerhard Schröder.

Some Greens viewed the victory as a long-awaited opportunity to transform the party’s principles into public policy. For other Greens, however, the 1998 victory was bittersweet. For example, Green members of the government, particularly Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (who was often considered Germany’s most popular politician), had to support policies they once vehemently opposed. Once committed to nonviolence, the withdrawal of Germany from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and unilateral disarmament, the Greens supported participation of German military forces in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 and troop deployments in Afghanistan as part of the global war on terrorism in 2001. For many party members, this was a flagrant violation of the party’s most precious values: nonviolence and the rejection of military force as a solution to political problems. Indeed, several Green members of parliament voted against the government on the issue of deploying troops in Afghanistan. In 2002 the Greens scored their biggest success to date, winning 8.6 percent of the vote; the party also continued its coalition government with the SPD. Relations with the SPD soured in 2005 over Schröder’s decision to call an early election. The Greens campaigned on their own and did marginally worse, winning 8.3 percent of the vote, but they were ousted from government when they and the SPD were unable to muster a majority in the Bundestag.

The 2005 election left the Greens at a crossroads, with the party part of no governing coalition at either the state or national levels for the first time in two decades and with Fischer, their longtime leader, retiring from public life. Particularly troubling for the Greens was that younger voters, once the core of the party’s electorate, seemed less inclined than their counterparts in the 1970s and ’80s to back the Greens. With strong environmental protection endorsed by all the major parties, the Greens found themselves in search of new issues and a more modern image.

In 2008 many greeted with optimism the election of Cem Özdemir as the party’s coleader, along with Claudia Roth. Özdemir was the first ethnic Turk to head a German political party. In the 2009 parliamentary elections the Greens improved on their 2005 results, winning 10.7 percent of the national vote and increasing their number of seats in the Bundestag from 51 to 68.

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Troubles at nuclear plants in Japan, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, buoyed Green numbers at the polls in German state elections later that month. The party posted impressive gains in Saxony-Anhalt and Rhineland-Palatinate, but its performance in Baden-Württenberg shook the German political landscape. The state, which was one of Germany’s most economically powerful, had been ruled by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 1953. Although the CDU won the largest percentage of votes in Baden-Württemberg, it failed to capture enough to form a government, and the Greens claimed their first state government as the senior partners in a coalition with the SPD.

Although the Green Party’s percentage of the vote fell to about 8 percent in the 2013 federal parliamentary elections, it faced the possibility of being asked to join in coalition rule with the election-winning CDU-CSU alliance, whose former coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), had failed to win any seats in the Bundestag. After months of negotiations, the CDU-CSU ultimately renewed its grand coalition with the SDP, and the Greens remained one of the largest opposition parties. The Greens improved their result in the 2017 general election, but the continuation of the SDP–CDU-CSU coalition kept them out of government. In 2018 Chancellor Angela Merkel announced her intention to step down at the end of her fourth term, and the 2021 federal election took on a new importance. For many younger voters, Merkel, who had been in power since 2005, was the only chancellor they had ever known, and the Greens held great appeal for the so-called “Merkel Generation.” As the September 2021 general election approached, the Greens topped both parties in the ruling coalition in opinion polls, but that lead soon eroded, in part because of missteps by Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock. Nevertheless, the Greens performed very strongly, capturing 14.8 percent of the vote and 118 seats in the Bundestag. With the two major parties each winning about a quarter of the vote, the third-place Greens were seen as potential kingmakers ahead of postelection coalition talks.