West Germany: The Greens See Red

• Share

Inside Hamburg's ultramodern Congress Center, delegates to the seventh conference of the Greens, West Germany's amalgam of antinuclear protesters, peace demonstrators and environmentalists, largely ignored one of the many slogans on the banners: WE GREENS MUST STICK TOGETHER. So far apart were the party's two factions—the fundamentalists, who remain faithful to the party's nonpolitical roots, and the realists, who want to have an impact on national policy—that the conference nearly split the party. At issue: whether to forge a coalition with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party.

A so-called red-green alliance could, if current voter support holds, replace the center-right government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1987 national elections. The conference voted to allow such alliances on the local level but declared the Social Democrats not currently acceptable as national coalition partners. That left open the possibility of future deals with the SPD. In that event, the fundamentalists, mostly Marxist-Leninists, would make the withdrawal of U.S. missiles a key demand.