THE RISE of the Green Party in West Germany has inspired peace and ecology activists in other countries to try to emulate their success. In the forthcoming European elections 'green' movements from all EEC states are putting up candidates on a separate political platform, which in Britain is represented by the Ecology Party.
gaining any of the British Euroseats or even winning more than a derisory 'fringe' vote, the growing influence of the green current among a certain layer of some attention to the lessons to be learned from the German Greens.
There can be no doubt where on the West German political spectrum the Green located.
The main body of its members and drawn from the traditions of the student movement and 'New Left' as well as from the feminist movement. Its programme demands are in the main unequivocally anticapitalist anti-imperialist.
Their success in the March 1983 federal elections, when their vote of just over five cent secured them Although there is no prospect of the Ecologists had come to regard them as the political wing of the peace movement.
By Günter Minnerup The imporGreens had per power of the late 1970s.
ogical' Greens' success Chancellor Minister), Schmidt, persuading deploy nuclear Westerr Europe, remained This support for rearmament 1982.
The German trade-union Tene lon DGB supported ing individual member mobilising huge peace rallies harness power of organised the vival and sectarian individuals.
The Greens ing that organised be The SPD in tion SPD in power. consolidated its antiits nuclear must refusal their NEC APEX the bow to strikers' demands, would annual conference. energy and other ecology issues, and aligned itself — albeit cautiously unions' campaign for a 35 hour week, many Greens lucreably worried about their electoral support drifting back to social democracy and especially its rejuvenated hell wil Sectarian Deep have opened up over this in the ranks of the Greens between the former East German dissiThe cancellation will cost estimated £100,000 at least of the funds, the members will lose their democratic rights for this year to decide policy.
ecutive like MacGregor and Inalcner can l giv in, whatever the cost, a bunch of irresponsible workers demanding more money.
Fitzpatrick - the army's answer to Nielson dent Rudolf Bahro whose response is a secO He kind of joint campaigning and political alliances with the SPD, and those - the so-called 'red Greens' who are prepared to enter united fronts even to parliamentary These differences are more than tactical disputes over how to hold on to green vote: they represent deep philosophical strategic divisions over the causes of the arms race, the threat the vironmental balance, oppression and exploitation, the social ideological forces capable of combating them.
This reveals the fact that progressive and anticapitalist causes do not, in themselves, make ol coherent philosophy and strategy and it exposes the social onesies of much of the youthful radicalism the Greens' electoral success.
Those toying with the idea of counterposing a green political party to the party of organised labour in Britain should ponder these German lessons.
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radicals both within and outside the Labour Party, and especially in CND, demands that socialists pay