Germany’s Green Party is within reach of the country’s highest office. If and when it takes power, will it be necessary to create a party beyond green?
Germany in the 1950s, and in some election or another the Social Democratic Party (SPD) ran on the slogan “no experiments”: a commitment to continue the “social market” strategy of the ruling centre-right government led by the Christian Democratic Union.
It’s a doozy of a small target strategy — though it appears to have been bested by the ALP’s current pitch of “Labor. Ummmm…” — but it was really the only option.
The Germans craved stability over anything else, after the 1933 to 1945 unpleasantness. The focus on stability was so insistent that when a new generation arose there was a predicable result: a decade of chaos and contestation, which made it a world model for complex political struggle. Out of that came a lot, including the formation of the German Greens which was a co-progenitor of the global green movement.
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