It wasn't supposed to be this way. Just a year ago the German Green Party was riding high, polling at 20+% in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. The Green Party would be the king-maker in this month's national election, with its statesman-like leader Juergen Trittin forming a red-green coalition government where he would be Germany's new finance minister.
But with a week to go before voters go to the polls Murphy's Law has prevailed and the Green Party will most likely achieve single digits. The Left Party has emerged as Germany's strongest Third Party - but it is the ugly girl at the dance who nobody wants. Unless something extraordinary happens on Sunday, it looks like another Grand Coalition will be in power.
What happened to the Greens? To be sure, Angela Merkel proved to be a deft triangulator and took the nuclear power issue off the table when she announced that Germany would phase out its nukes. But most of the Green Party wounds have been self-inflicted. The Greens could have taken a lesson from Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City. Bloomberg was very popular in New York for over a decade, but then he decided to ban large servings of soda and sugary drinks in an effort to fight obesity in the city. New Yorkers objected to this imposition of the "nanny state" and Bloomberg's perceived arrogance in knowing what was best for everyone. Pride goeth before the fall. The Green Party made the same blunder by proposing a "Veggie Day" to meat-loving Germans.
Then the Green Party shoot itself in its foot by proposing a higher income tax on the same upper-middle class affluent citizens who have been the Green's largest constituency. The Greens had to learn the hard way that self-interest always comes before saving the planet.
But the most damaging blow to the Greens has come from an unsavory chapter from the party's own history. I've written about the Greens' early flirtation with paedophila in their embrace of the sexual revolution in the 1970s. Now the scandal has ensnared the top leadership - Juergen Trittin himself.
Berlin (dpa) - Conservatives in Germany have called on an opposition candidate to resign just days before parliamentary elections following a report presenting evidence that Green Party fringe officials supported legalizing paedophilia 30 years ago. Officials from the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took special note of the research, publishing Monday in the Taz newspaper, that current leading Green candidate Juergen Tritten was in charge of the controversial 1981 joint policy document.
I don't see any option for Trittin other than to resign immediately - quite a comedown for the presumptive finance minister. The Green Party is now going to have to go into hibernation and rebuild - it's dreams of once again governing dashed. The only consolation is that the "other third party" - the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) - are in even worse shape, and may not make it over the 5% hurdle this Sunday.
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