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HANOVER, Germany: Germany’s Greens have gone grey. The world’s most successful pro-environment party has turned deadly serious about gaining power by stealing votes from Chancellor Angela Merkel - and perhaps by joining her.
The muesli, woolly sweaters, thick beards and endless debates about abstract issues that were once part of any Greens congress are largely gone. In their place is a more mature party of smartly dressed professionals with one clear aim: getting back into government after federal elections next year.
At their unusually harmonious three-day party congress in Hanover that ended on Sunday, Greens leaders were applauded for hailing their party’s “conservative values” and unabashedly trying to appeal to centre-right voters, using language that a decade ago would have had them booed off the stage.
Pollsters put support for the Greens at 13 per cent, enough if the electoral arithmetic goes their way to make them kingmakers after Germans vote in September, 2013. The party would prefer a coalition with the Social Democrats, renewing a government which ruled Germany from 1998 to 2005. But Greens are quietly thinking the unthinkable and opening up to a possible alliance with Merkel’s conservatives, long their political arch enemy.
Greens express distaste for an alliance with Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU), but interest in her supporters. “We don’t want the CDU, we want only your voters,” Katrin Goering-Eckart, a newly-elected party leader, told the Congress.
Goering-Eckart, a Lutheran church leader, expresses the Greens’ pride in their weightiness, openly admitting their hope that the makeover will attract conservative voters. “If you want to run the country, if you want policies that add up, then you’ve got to be serious about it,” she told Reuters. “It’s not something you can do with smoke and mirrors.”
The problem for the Greens is that their preferred partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), are languishing at 30 per cent support in opinion polls. This may not be enough for the two parties to win a parliamentary majority and oust Merkel, whose conservatives are polling about 39 per cent.
Once a peacenik ecological movement with a far-left tilt, delegates in Hanover made clear that they are no longer dead set against a coalition with Merkel, even though many prefaced their remarks with “We’d rather have an SPD-Greens government, but...”
The Greens - once famous for their unpredictable and self-destructive congress battles that could stretch beyond midnight - have already proved they can attract conservatives.
The muesli, woolly sweaters, thick beards and endless debates about abstract issues that were once part of any Greens congress are largely gone. In their place is a more mature party of smartly dressed professionals with one clear aim: getting back into government after federal elections next year.
At their unusually harmonious three-day party congress in Hanover that ended on Sunday, Greens leaders were applauded for hailing their party’s “conservative values” and unabashedly trying to appeal to centre-right voters, using language that a decade ago would have had them booed off the stage.
Pollsters put support for the Greens at 13 per cent, enough if the electoral arithmetic goes their way to make them kingmakers after Germans vote in September, 2013. The party would prefer a coalition with the Social Democrats, renewing a government which ruled Germany from 1998 to 2005. But Greens are quietly thinking the unthinkable and opening up to a possible alliance with Merkel’s conservatives, long their political arch enemy.
Greens express distaste for an alliance with Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU), but interest in her supporters. “We don’t want the CDU, we want only your voters,” Katrin Goering-Eckart, a newly-elected party leader, told the Congress.
Goering-Eckart, a Lutheran church leader, expresses the Greens’ pride in their weightiness, openly admitting their hope that the makeover will attract conservative voters. “If you want to run the country, if you want policies that add up, then you’ve got to be serious about it,” she told Reuters. “It’s not something you can do with smoke and mirrors.”
The problem for the Greens is that their preferred partners, the Social Democrats (SPD), are languishing at 30 per cent support in opinion polls. This may not be enough for the two parties to win a parliamentary majority and oust Merkel, whose conservatives are polling about 39 per cent.
Once a peacenik ecological movement with a far-left tilt, delegates in Hanover made clear that they are no longer dead set against a coalition with Merkel, even though many prefaced their remarks with “We’d rather have an SPD-Greens government, but...”
The Greens - once famous for their unpredictable and self-destructive congress battles that could stretch beyond midnight - have already proved they can attract conservatives.
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