From “les verts” to “los verdes”, green parties across Europe are praying for the same bounce that has put the German “grünen” in charge of a key state in a historic election upset strongly affected by Japan’s nuclear disaster.
It may be a world away from the devastation of northern Japan, but the election last weekend in the quiet and prosperous state of Baden-Württemberg was a political tsunami for Europe’s most powerful economy and the aftershocks may be felt all over the European Union.
The “Fukushima effect” swept aside the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) — the party of Angela Merkel, the chancellor, which had governed the state for 58 years — and set the stage for the first Green party state government. Green politicians believe that in time other European colleagues may follow Germany’s lead.
“It is to be expected that the inevitable new risk-assessment of nuclear energy will make green policies appealing to other European electorates,” said Rebecca Harms, co-president of the Green group in the European parliament.
“The information flow about the terrifying events in Japan has made it clear that the long-standing concern about nuclear energy that has been at the core of green policies has been entirely justified.”
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For decades in Germany the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats dominated the political arena with the Free Democrats (FDP) playing a supporting role. Now the Greens, led by a former communist, are poised to take charge of Baden-Württemberg, an economic powerhouse which is home to the headquarters of Daimler and Porsche.
Green parties everywhere will study their tactics: one key element in the party’s appeal was the strain of conservatism that lurks behind its progressive image.
When the German Greens emerged in the 1970s, an era of protest, Helmut Kohl, the former chancellor, dismissed them as “environmental idiots who will have disappeared again soon”. They did not. From being a platform for antinuclear protests in the 1970s, they embraced the anti-war movement of the 1980s.
“We had nothing materially but everything in terms of ideals,” Lukas Beckmann, a co-founder of the party, told Der Spiegel magazine.
Since those days they have toned down militant rhetoric to emerge as sober political players: Beckmann sits on the board of directors of GLS, a “green bank”. Far from the uncompromising environmentalists of yesteryear, the Greens are widely perceived as being the only party with firm convictions, chief of which is opposition to nuclear energy.
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Winfried Kretschmann, the 62-year-old former teacher in charge of the Baden-Württemberg greens, is likely to become the state’s first Green prime minister, a turn of events that Claudia Roth, the German Green co-leader, describes as the start of “a new political era”.
Kretschmann was a communist militant at university. However, he recently announced on his website that his student radicalism had been “a fundamental political error”. These days he likes to emphasise his Catholic roots.
Nuclear power was the dominant theme of the election: anti-nuclear sentiment had been building even before the Fukushima disaster, ever since Merkel announced that she was extending the lives of the nation’s 17 power plants. In October last year hundreds of thousands of demonstrators blocked the transport of radioactive waste into Germany’s controversial Gorleben storage plant.
Other Green party obsessions, meanwhile, did not seem to scare off the voters. Besides wanting to do away with nuclear power, the “grünen” also want speed limits on autobahns, referring to cars as “the most inefficient form of mobility”. They also dislike digital technology and its potential to be used to spy on citizens.
Their pledge to protect the environment was in harmony with conservatives’ dreams of preserving the character of the state, embodied in its hilly vineyards and Black Forest villages.
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The German-born Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of France's most prominent greens, is a European politician closely studying the German surge. He believes that other parties, including his own, can benefit from the Fukushima effect.
“The Greens are assuming a growing political responsibility, gaining good scores everywhere,” he said.
However, “Dany le rouge”, as he was known when he led the student protests in Paris in 1968, has been reluctant to go as far as Kretschmann in dumping militant baggage: to French greens, Kretschmann would seem a dangerous right-winger, Cohn-Bendit believes.
He blamed the French party’s failure to make a breakthrough in recent regional elections on the voting system: “Les Verts”, he insisted, would do much better with proportional representation.
The same arguments have been heard in Britain. But even without electoral tinkering the Greens might be advancing: a Scotsman/YouGov opinion poll put them in fourth place, slightly ahead of the Liberal Democrats, in the contest for the Scottish parliament on May 5.
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One question being asked around Europe is whether the vote in Baden-Württemberg marks an enduring political shift or just a short-term reaction to Japan’s radiation leaks.
Political analysts expect the Greens to ride the Fukushima wave of public anxiety and increase their already impressive standing in state elections in Bremen and Berlin later this year.
Similarly, if Merkel’s governing coalition were to come undone — her partners in the liberal FDP, led by Guido Westerwelle, the foreign minister, are near to collapse at a mere 5% in the polls — it is conceivable that her CDU, at 35%, could reach out to the Greens, who stand at 20%, in third place nationally behind the Social Democrats.
The challenge now for the Greens will be to prove that they are more than a party of protest.