BY JIM GREEN
The German Greens, junior partner in a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), voted on November 16 in the German parliament to support the deployment of 3900 German troops for the United States-led "war on terrorism". This vote by the Greens MPs was endorsed by party's national conference on November 24-25.
Earlier this year, the SPD had to rely on support from conservative parties — the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) — to win parliamentary support to send about 450 German soldiers to Macedonia. Nineteen SPD members and five Greens voted against the deployment.
This time, SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder raised the stakes, announcing on November 13 that the vote on German military involvement in the "war on terrorism" would be tied to a vote of confidence in the government.
The CDU and the FDP decided to vote against the confidence motion, even though they support German military deployment.
Schroeder expected the Greens, and the pacifist wing of the SPD, to fall into line. If the confidence motion was voted down because of opposition from some Greens, the SPD could replace the Greens with the FDP in a new coalition government. A new election was another possibility.
Whatever the outcome of the parliamentary vote, Schroeder and the SPD were likely to be strengthened. For the Greens, however, an early election would spell the end for all 47 of their MPs if the party did not attract 5% of the vote, the minimum required for parliamentary representation. Recent opinion polls show Greens support hovering around 5%, down from 6.7% at the 1998 federal election.
Only eight Green or SPD MPs had to vote against the parliamentary motion for it to be lost. Eight Green MPs issued a statement over the November 10-11 weekend — just before Schroeder's announcement that the vote on military deployment would double as a vote of confidence in the government — saying that the war was not serving its intended purpose and was hurting the Afghan people.
Other Green MPs had also expressed opposition. A November 8 report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper predicted that as many as 20 Green MPs and five SPD MPs might vote against military deployment.
Fischer threatens resignation
German foreign minister and Greens leader Joschka Fischer threatened to resign from the party if Green MPs did not support German military deployment. He said in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, on November 8 that "the core question is whether we want to leave the United States, our ally, standing alone". Fischer also made specious analogies with Nazism, warning of the dangers of a new German unilateralism.
The Greens came up with a quaint solution to their dilemma — the eight Green MPs on public record as opposing German military deployment agreed to "split" their vote and thereby secure a majority for the government in the confidence motion. "We're trying to make it clear by splitting our votes that we are for one thing but against the other", said Hans-Christian Stroebele, one of the eight Green MPs.
The final tally in the November 16 vote was 336 votes in support of the confidence motion, two more than the 334 voted required for it to pass, with four Greens and one SPD parliamentarian opposing it.
An open letter from the Green Party USA to the German Greens on November 7 said: "Most Greens worldwide recognize that this is a war for oil and political domination and will do nothing to protect US citizens or any people from terrorism. Joschka Fischer and the ... Greens who are propping up the German government have put power before principle. Their claim that they must participate in the war effort in order to make it more humane is obscene. They seem to be saying that by keeping themselves part of the government they can make 'humanitarian' cluster bombs or 'cancer-free' depleted uranium casings. This is nonsense."
The Green Party of England and Wales also wrote to Fischer on September 27 urging the German Greens to withdraw their "unequivocal" support for US military action.
On November 24-25, Greens leaders had to sell their pro-war policy to 750 delegates at a national Greens conference in the northern port city of Rostock. Delegates were met by anti-war demonstrators with placards portraying Fischer in combat gear with rifle in hand.
Eleven of the 16 state branches of the Greens had declared opposition to German military participation in the "war on terrorism" prior to the national conference. Pro-war Greens leaders used Schroeder's trick at the Rostock conference — linking support for the war to the viability of the SPD-Greens coalition government. This linkage seems to have influenced delegates, with a motion in favour of German military deployment supported by an estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the delegates in a show of hands.
Party of war
The Greens' anti-war policies and campaigning were central to the party's growth in the late 1970s and '80s. As recently as 1998, the Greens' election program said that the party is "not prepared to support military enforcement of peace or combat operations" and it supports the "de-militarisation of politics — all the way to the abolishment of the army and the dissolution of NATO".
Things changed quickly once the SPD-Greens coalition government was formed. In 1999, the Greens supported German involvement in the US-NATO military operations in the Balkans. Fischer and other Greens MPs have consistently supported military strikes by the US and Britain on Iraq since 1998. The Greens also support the militarisation of the European Union, and the party no longer advocates the dissolution of NATO.
In recent months, Fischer has sought to play the role of "peace-maker" between Israel and the Palestinians, supporting the Mitchell Plan — the US-driven sham which calls for an end to violence and a return to political negotiations but ignores Israel's oppression of Palestinians and its occupation of Palestinian land.
Now the Greens have endorsed the Bush gang's worldwide, open-ended "war against terrorism". Following the national Greens conference at Rostock, Winfried Hermann, a Green MP opposed to the war, said, "The active members will start to break off. And that hurts." Reuters reported on November 26 that a number of regional party leaders had recently quit the Greens out of disgust for its support for the US war on Afghanistan.
"It's a lose-lose situation for the Greens", academic Dietmar Herz told Reuters on November 14. "If the rebels cave in to the massive pressure they're facing and back Schroeder, their credibility will be destroyed and the party will probably lose a lot of voters in the next election. It's a very dangerous situation for the Greens."
There's no doubt that opposing the "war on terrorism" would have posed risks for the Greens — the immediate risk of the collapse of the coalition government, and the possibility that, for a variety of reasons, the Greens might fail to secure 5% in the next federal election, thereby losing all 47 Bundestag seats.
But even within the narrow parameters of parliamentary politics, a case could be made for opposing military deployment. As the Green Party USA argued in their November 7 letter, "the coalition government could decide, under pressure [from the Greens and the peace movement], to take the anti-war route and withdraw its support for the US war. That would preserve the government coalition as well as heal some of the rifts in the German Green Party — if today's proponents of war truly cared about such concerns."
Moreover, opposition to the "war on terrorism" might win the Greens as many or more votes as it costs the party. It would shore up the existing Green voter base — 70% of Greens voters oppose German military deployment. The Greens would also provide a pole of attraction for tens of millions of Germans opposed to German military deployment.
Of course, there's also the argument that the Greens ought to oppose, inside and outside the Bundestag, imperialist military ventures regardless of the electoral implications.
Party of Democratic Socialism
A growing number of former Greens members and supporters are gravitating to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party. The PDS is the only party with parliamentary representation that unequivocally opposes the "war on terrorism" and any German contribution to it.
An article in the October 22 FAZ noted that the PDS has grown steadily stronger "because it has not restricted its work solely to a parliamentary role. Instead, it is capable of mobilising resistance, protest and mistrust against the system as a whole".
At the October 21 Berlin state election, the PDS won 22.6% of the vote, only slightly less than the CDU (23.7%) and not far short of the SPD vote (29.7%). The PDS vote has trebled in Berlin since 1990. The party still relies heavily on eastern Germany for its support, but recently it has won greater support in western Germany. More importantly, the PDS is attracting a new, young layer of members and voters. Nearly one-third of the first-time voters in the Berlin election voted for the PDS.
The Greens lost votes in the Berlin election — the 17th consecutive state election at which the party has lost support since 1998.
Following the October 21 Berlin election, the SPD formed a coalition government in Berlin with the Greens and the FDP. Schroeder argued against an SPD-PDS coalition, citing the PDS's opposition to the "war on terrorism" as evidence that it had "not yet arrived" in the political mainstream.
One of Schroeder's concerns is that the PDS might, over time, become the most popular party in Berlin and that this could strengthen the party's position nationally as well. The PDS won 5.1% of the vote in the national election in 1998 and has 36 MPs. The party is expected to increase its vote at next year's federal election.
From Green Left Weekly, December 5, 2001.
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