This is a summary of the some of the main points in an excellent article on the German Green Party - by Olivier Cyran in Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2011. The full article can be accessed here.
During the 1980s, Germany’s Green Party was seen as a radical left party with a strong social reform agenda. Things have changed! Today, having over many years taken part in coalition governments at various levels in the German government system, the Greens are a fully fledged establishment party adorned with a comforting, left-sounding veneer. They are happy to share power with the CDU (the Tory-equivalent Christian Democratic Party of Angela Merkel) or the New Labour-style SPD.
They are “Neoliberals on bikes”, according to Jutta Ditfurth – a co-founder of the Greens who left them in 1991.
In March 2011, for the first time in German history, the Party took the presidency of a regional government – Baden-Wurttemberg, the richest and most populous of Germany’s 16 states. The Green president, Winfried Kretschmann, quickly sought to reassure “the market”, “We are going to follow the path we promised within a bourgeois society”.
As avowed bourgeois politicians, they pursue promises as other bourgeois politicians. They ignore them. Last February in Hamburg, for example, the Green/CDU coalition was turfed out in favour, unfortunately, of the SPD (with large abstentions in working class ditricts). This followed the abandonement of plans supported by the Greens, for scrapping coal-fired power stations, developing a tram system of public transport, and education reforms.
Earlier, in 2005, an SPD-Green coalition in Hamburg had set up, “the harshest unemployment benefit system in Europe”. When it was conceived the previous year, the right-wing newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called it, “the most drastic cut in social security since 1949”. It was a merger of unemployment benefit and social security which led to rates so low in some circumstances that it was partially suspended by the Courts in Karlsruhe, in October 2010, because it was ruled that the families who received the benefit could not meet their children’s basic needs.
Hamburg’s Greens thought the level of benefit was a little low, “but we still think”, they said, “that it was a good idea to … encourage people back to work”. It was admitted by the Greens that this “reform” could only have been implemented by a Red-Green alliance because had the openly right-wing parties tried to do it (the CDU and FDP), “it would have caused a revolution”.
The new benefit system had been devised by Peter Hartz – at the time an HR director at Volkswagen and friend of SPD Chancellor Schroder. In January 2007, Hartz received a two-year suspended sentence and a fine of €576,000 for having offered bribes, travel perks and prostitutes to members of the Volkswagen works council.
Hamburg is often referred to as the tax evasion capital of Germany. Twenty six of Germany’s richest 300 people live there. Their combined wealth is around €44bn – half the city’s GDP. When a Die Linke (left party) member of the city council asked for extra tax inspectors to help tackle the problem, the Greens voted against it!
