When Germany's Green Party first entered parliament 25 years ago, few imagined that the protest party -- with its penchant for beards, dungarees and sunflowers -- would one day become a sought-after ally for conservatives.
On Thursday night, though, Greens in Hamburg voted to launch talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), on what would be their first state-level coalition. If successful, that tie-up could help set the scene for a national alliance.
The decision came two days after party leaders marked the anniversary of their arrival in the national parliament with organic wine and donning respectable suits -- reflecting a long journey to the political center for one of the continent's most successful ecology-based parties.
Today's Greens are a far cry from the 28 lawmakers who took their seats in Bonn in 1983 -- after marching through the West German capital with a tree felled to make way for an airport runway and a dead fir from the Black Forest.
"Back then, no one could have imagined our working together with the CDU," Renate Kuenast, the party's co-leader in parliament, said this week.
Now, she said, the Greens should be prepared to cooperate with conservatives "if they're intent on improving society."
"But they should understand that even though we no longer have the same clothes and beards ... we still have the same political visions," she said.
With Germany's coalitions in flux, trying out an alliance with the CDU could free the Greens from relying on their usual partnership with the center-left Social Democrats, the struggling party of former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, with whom they governed Germany for seven years. And such an alliance could expand Merkel's options in the future.
On Thursday, Hamburg Greens endorsed the idea after lawmaker Krista Sager urged them to seize the opportunity.
"This is a historic chance now and we must try to get as much as possible out of this chance for people in our city," she said.
Still, these are insecure times for the party, which has struggled for direction since Schroeder's government lost power in 2005 and their de facto leader, former foreign minister Joschka Fischer, went into retirement.
Its current leaders will have to be careful about embracing new partners, given the risk of alienating grass-roots members who are often left-leaning and pacifist.
Earlier this week, top Greens decided to go into next year's national election with a leadership duo that reflects those tensions -- pairing Kuenast, a pragmatist who was Schroeder's agriculture minister, with Juergen Trittin, a former environment minister who is closer to the party's left wing.
Trittin and others have suggested the party could work with the new Left party -- a combination of former East German communists and former Social Democrats disgruntled by economic reform that has drained votes from the center-left and complicated efforts to build a coalition since it emerged in 2005.
In Hamburg, some Greens suggest speculation about a possible coalition with the CDU ahead of last month's state election contributed to a relatively poor vote tally for the party in a traditional stronghold. But they see opportunities too.
"We Greens have arrived in the middle of society and it's time to position ourselves anew," said Helmut Deecke, the party's treasurer in Hamburg.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS