Eideard

Thekla Walker elected new co-leader of the Greens in Baden-Wuerttemberg
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The Greens have grown out of their woolly jumpers and sandals and turned enough fellow Germans on to environmentalism to make the party — already the world’s most successful green movement — the possible kingmakers in the 2013 elections.

Founded three decades ago by rebels from the 1968 student movement, ‘ban-the-bomb’ peaceniks, ecologists and feminists, the Greens got their first taste of power from 1998 to 2005 under Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD).

But they have come into their own in the past year. A strong run of local elections gave them a presence in all 16 regional assemblies for the first time as well as their first state premier, Winfried Kretschmann, who ousted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in conservative Baden-Wuerttemberg…

“We have shown that economics and ecology don’t contradict each other — which is a quantitative leap forward,” said party co-leader Claudia Roth in an interview…

The party has climbed to historic highs in opinion polls in the past year of 15-20 percent, from 10.7 percent in the last elections in 2009.

It has now surpassed the current junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), to become the third force in a system that has been dominated by the conservatives, now at around 32 percent, and the SPD, who poll as much as 30 percent…

As conservative German voters’ old animosity to the environmentalists fades, “well-educated, higher-income people — the upper-middle class — are moving toward the Greens and forgetting the old ideological barriers between them,” said politics professor Gero Neugebauer at Berlin’s Free University.

Now renewable energy is creating more jobs than traditional industry in parts of former East Germany, the financial crisis has turned once radical Green ideas like financial transactions taxes mainstream, and the Greens side with the once-demonized International Monetary Fund in some areas of financial policy.

RTFA. Lots of detail, anecdotal information.

The German Greens could give lessons to the middle-class radicals in the United States who occasionally play Lets Pretend to be a Political Party.

Green Party supporters celebrate in Bremen
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Angela Merkel has been dealt another blow after support for her Christian Democratic Union party plunged once again – this time at regional elections in Bremen.

For the first time in state elections, the Green party won more votes than the CDU, capturing almost 23% of the vote on Sunday, according to an exit poll from German state television ARD. The Green surge, if confirmed by final results, means the party will continue to rule in coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), who have been in charge of the north German city for 66 years.

While the Greens’ victory in the smallest of Germany’s 16 states will not directly affect the chancellor’s hold on the federal government, it is another symbolic black eye for Merkel and her party.

In Baden-Württemberg’s state election in March, the Christian Democrats were voted out of power for the first time in five decades. The anti-nuclear Greens became the strongest party there amid concerns over Germany’s atomic future following the Fukushima plant accident in Japan. The win will mean that Germany will have its first Green governor…

Sunday’s vote in Bremen marked the first time in German history that people between 16 and 18 were allowed to vote for their state legislature. Despite that effort to boost the vote, ARD estimated a turnout of 54%, down from 57% four years earlier.

I’m not close enough the streets of Germany to hazard an educated guess on how much of the vote embraced Green ideology and platform and how much was simple rejection of what the Conservative Christians have failed to achieve, have substituted for progress. But, given the diminishing turnout, I’d tend towards the latter sociology – rather than a mandate for eco victory. Yet.

Hitler’s “defense” force marching into Austria, 12 March 1938

The Austrian capital Vienna has announced plans to erect a memorial in honour of soldiers who deserted from Adolf Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht.

The city council has yet to decide the exact location, but campaigners want it to be put in Heldenplatz (Heroes Square) alongside war memorials. The square is also where Hitler, born in Austria, addressed crowds in 1938 when Austria was annexed to Germany…

Two years ago Austria’s parliament agreed to rehabilitate soldiers criminalised by the Nazis for deserting from the Wehrmacht.

The decision to erect a memorial was endorsed by the socialist and green parties which form Vienna’s municipal government coalition. Vienna Green Party leader David Ellensohn said the monument could be modelled on other memorials to Wehrmacht deserters in some German cities…

“In large parts of the Austrian population deserters are still considered cowards, traitors, even comrade-killers. A monument – and especially the public debate around the erection of the monument – could somehow change that.”

Mr Geldmacher said an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Austrians deserted from the Wehrmacht, especially in the final days of World War II.

And someday – someday – the United States may even honor those who deserted from our war on VietNam.

Not yet. The chickenhawks who run for public office still reinforce the patriotic agitprop that sends young men and women off to invade lands judged threatening to the United States – regardless of history and truth.

One of India’s leading environmental crusaders is planning to launch the country’s first Green party.

After his success in forcing old and polluting vehicles off the streets of the eastern city of Calcutta, Subhas Dutta says the time has come to set up a political party to protect the country’s environment.

“Many like me who fight for environment protection have realised we need a full fledged party in India. Our movements are localised and it is not enough to operate as pressure groups or just fight legal battles,” Mr Dutta says.

He is due to visit the United Kingdom next month to meet the leaders of the Green Party there.

“We are also in touch with the Green Party of Germany, we want to understand how the Green parties operate in Europe before we launch a Green Party of India…

Mr Dutta says he was also in touch with leading environmentalists in India. “This networking takes some time so that we have a truly national party, but we are more or less through with this,” he said.

The task of building a truly national movement in India has to be a daunting task regardless of the issue or issues. The land is so large and diverse, the divisions within any sector or region are divided by enormous measures of education and income, culture and history.

I wish him well.

Daylife/AP Photo by Jens Meyer

The Green party, one of Germany’s main political parties, has elected the son of Turkish immigrants to its top political post, the first time any party here has chosen a leader with an immigrant background.

The election Saturday of Cem Ozdemir, 42, born in southern Germany of parents who had come from Turkey to work as “Gastarbeiter,” or guest workers, during the 1960s, marks a major turning point not only for the opposition Greens, but also for the country as a whole.

Even though more than 2.6 million Turks live in Germany, accounting for 3 percent of the population, few have managed to make it to the higher ranks of the professions, including politics and the civil service.

But with a conservative party that had chosen Angela Merkel to run as chancellor in 2005 – a successful gambit – and now an ethnic Turk at the helm of an influential party, it appears that German society is slowly breaking with the past, when women were inconspicuous in public and immigrants’ voices were seldom heard.

Good article. Thorough – as I would expect from the IHT.

Kind of where a lot of the world was going until Reagan-Populism took over the United States.