Traditional politicians play a tough, cynical game of wealth and power. The emergence of the Green movement in the 1970s supposedly signaled a new kind of politics: gentle, altruistic idealism. A Greenpeace slogan sums up their philosophy.
Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
Green politics began in the small Australian state of Tasmania in the early 1970s, but the movement has been most successful in Europe -- and nowhere more than in Germany. The Green movement preached its four pillars-- ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy, and non-violence –with all the fervour of a religion.
The message resonated with the public. The German Greens held their first national conference in 1980 and won 27 seats in the 1983 election for the Bundestag, the national parliament, with 5.7 percent of the national vote. Their support steadily increased, their influence magnified by Germany’s complex system of proportional representation. After the 1998 election, the Social Democrats and the Greens governed in coalition with three Green cabinet members, including Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
Event after this apogee of Green political power in federal politics, today an estimated 20 percent of Germans support the Greens and they have representatives in all Länder (state) parliaments. Long-haired, beard-sporting, dope-smoking tree-huggers became members of the German political establishment in what seemed like the triumph of morality over cynicism, conscience over power.
Lurking in the not-so-long-ago Green past, however, is a dark secret: paedophilia. “For a period of time in the mid-1980s,” the Greens “practically served as the parliamentary arm of the paedophile movement,” says Der Spiegel, Germany's leading news magazine: (more...)
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