Red and Green All Over?

Week in Review: Will Germany's governing coalition become another casualty of 9.11?

In the 1990s, centrists in the world's heavyweight democracies wrested power from conservative veteran Cold Warriors by promising voters that they wouldn't be all that different. They'd simply be putting a friendlier, more youthful bounce into more or less the same policies. Bill "the era of Big Government is over" Clinton put an end to 12 years of Reagan-Bush and Tony Blair finally shut the door on nearly two decades of Thatcher-Major by overtly signaling that they were hardly of the left at all. And besides, with the Berlin Wall down and everybody free, war seemed mighty unlikely -- where could it possibly come from and why? -- so, it was argued, the old left-right dichotomies no longer held water anyway. Why bother.

Gerhard Schröder implemented a similar game plan when he steered the Social Democrats (SPD) to victory in September 1998, closing the book on 16 years of governance under Helmut Kohl's autocratic hand. But the rules of the game were different for Schröder than for Clinton and Blair from the outset. Absolute parliamentary majorities for any one party in Germany are an anomaly. So, back in the days when the "New Berlin" was still new and "dotcom" had a whiff of a bright future about it rather than the stench of a failed past, Schröder, sporting Brioni suits and fine cigars, was presenting himself as a Social Democrat business could do business with -- and he was widely rumored to favor a "grand coalition" with Kohl's Christian Democrats.

Instead, once the voters had spoken, Schröder found himself in coalition talks with the Greens, a party with deep roots in the European New Left of the 60s and 70s and founded in the 80s as the movement turned pro-environment and anti-nuclear power, be it in the form of electrical power plants or US Pershing II missiles planted on German soil. With the exception of a very few state and local governments, the Greens had done very little actual governing. They were the exemplary oppositional party, most potently symbolized by the jeans and sneakers parliamentarian Joschka Fischer wore on his first days in the Bundestag. This new red-green combo was to be a first on the continent as far as national governments were concerned.

Once in the government, though, the Greens have kept having their wrists slapped. The SPD has particularly reined in Environmental Minister Jürgen Trittin, keeping him from fully pursuing the Green agenda (recycling old cars, a hefty ecology tax on gas, and of course, shutting down Germany's 19 nuclear power plants). Bits get through, but usually in very watered down form. The upside of the coalition, on the other hand, has been Joschka Fischer, now foreign minister and vice chancellor. Nearly throughout this government's term, Fischer has been the most or second-most popular politician in the country -- even as the chancellor himself slides up and down and back again in the polls.

But the greatest tests for the coalition have come in the form of an issue no one expected to be dealing with in the post-Cold War era: war. It was only halfway into the new government's term in 1999 that Germany was called on to give its thumbs up to NATO bombing raids over Serbia. The Greens called a special party-wide meeting. It was a circus. Pacifists stripped naked and wandered the convention hall among the shouts and murmurs and banners and impassioned speeches that clashed along the lines of "No More War" vs. "No More Auschwitz's." Fischer argued the second point and declared that if his party didn't back him up, he'd quit. For his efforts, he got his ear drum popped by a bag filled with red paint that was tossed at him and exploded rather spectacularly on the side of his head. But he also -- narrowly -- won approval to proceed with the government's official policy.

And here we are again. On two fronts, no less. For the moment, it seems that, with the exception of the UK, the US's NATO allies are going to be excused from any military action taken in revenge for the September 11 attacks. For the moment. In the meantime, Operation Essential Harvest has wrapped up in Macedonia, only to be replaced by a new one, code-named Amber Fox. Instead of collecting weapons from Albanian rebels, the new 1000-strong NATO force will do its best to keep at least a semblance of peace -- and Germany is leading that force with 700 troops.

Peacekeeping is all well and good, but it makes the pacifist wing of the Greens nervous nonetheless to see Germany stepping out to take the lead in any military action for the first time in its postwar history. And suppose the US does call on German troops, particularly those famed special forces? If the Greens don't play along, the coalition is over. This isn't just the verdict of SPD parliamentary leader Peter Struck, as Kate Connolly reports in The Guardian, but also that of Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Liberals (FDP), a party eager to take the Greens' place in the next government, and of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Green himself, serving in the European Parliament, and a close friend to Joschka Fischer.

Nonsense, replies Schröder, and it may indeed be more than official grandstanding. Both he and Fischer are said to have forged a close working relationship (so much so that Fischer is rumored to be considering a leap to the SPD), and for that matter, so, too, have Struck and his Green counterpart, Rezzo Schlauch. But with or without another circus staged by the Greens over military commitment, another, less ideological force may break up the red-green marriage of convenience after all: votes.

The Greens have been losing them, most recently in Hamburg, the 16th straight decrease in electoral percentage points in state elections. Interviewed the night of election, Hamburg Greens looked as pale as ghosts from another era. Which, in a way, they are. Taking into consideration that the real winner of that election was Ronald Schill, a man dubbed "Judge Merciless" by the media for the draconian sentences he handed down while presiding over his court and who scored over 19 percent of the vote though he hardly had a party to speak of, and taking into consideration that he did all this simply by holding out the promise of "security" in an insecure time, herewith, a few modest proposals offered free of charge to Greens looking for a way to turn their party's fortunes around:

First, Fischer should leave the Greens for the SPD. Greens are stuck on they idea that without him they're nothing, but the truth of the matter is, with him they're nothing. With Fischer in charge of the party, Green identity is fading into the Schröder-Fischer project of making Germany a force to be reckoned with in world affairs. That's fine as far as it goes, but it has very little to do with what the Greens are supposed to be all about. It's time for Fischer and the Greens to face up to their differences and amicably part ways.

Second, about that identity. Greens need to get over trying to appeal to the young. There is nothing -- nothing -- about your dumpy image as aging vegetarian 68ers that's going to win over the nation's youth. And that's putting it as politely as possible. Take a page from Clinton's 1992 strategy of turning his weaknesses into strengths. A graying Boomer radiating human warmth after a decade of coke-fuelled yuppie sharks and brokers, Clinton pretended to offer "change" to America, but in fact, presented a reassuringly old-fashioned familiarity.

You can do the same. The world is on the verge of a war it doesn't understand. The Greens can put a bit of distance between themselves and those who pretend they do understand and offer disturbed, nervous, even frightened German voters the balm of tradition. And a grand tradition it is, reaching back decades. No nukes. Peace. Love. Trees. Recycling.

That sort of thing. Might as well try it. You don't have much left to lose.

In Telepolis

Germans are commonly stereotyped around the world as rather boring sorts. Punctual, law-abiding, you know the drill. A batch of stories this week in Telepolis either blows the top off that characterization or simply points to exceptions that prove the rule. You be the judge.

Start with Tino Hanekamp's report on the latest escapades of 330-pound ex-hacker Kim Schmitz. Schmitz was last seen in the international press in February, offering 50 million euros to bail out the ailing ecommerce site LetsBuyIt.com. When the financial press scoffed, warning that Schmitz's "start-up factory," Kimvestor, was dubious operation not even officially registered as a company in Germany, other investors were found. But what a unique biography: at the age of 12, he was cracking the copyright protection on computer games. Three years later, he was breaking into the networks of businesses and even claimed to have wandered around in the security systems of NASA, the Pentagon and Citibank (a claim that has been contested).

In 1994, he was arrested in Munich and became an instant hero among hackers until the Chaos Computer Club accused him of cooperating with federal authorities. Schmitz made the accusation moot by switching sides altogether, founding Data Protect, a company helping other companies protect themselves from the likes of who he'd once been. And he's made an estimated 500 million marks ($250 million). Now, on his homepage, he's offering $10 million "for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden" and writing letters to governments and, well, the whole world. "This is not PR!" he keeps insisting. Again, you be the judge.

Then there's Dirk Köster, the German who's taken up residence on the Spanish island Mallorca and who saw opportunity knock immediately after those planes smashed into the WTC and the Pentagon. Köster officially registered "Angriff auf Amerika" ("Attack on America") under German trademark law. The phrase is his. You can't use it without checking with Köster first.

But that's not all. He's also registered "11. September 2001" (for use, he claims, on T-shirts he's having printed up) and the German versions of such catchy phrases as "The War of the 21st Century" and "The Revenge." Ernst Corinth suggests that this may be why we haven't seen the Bush administration hit back yet. They're worried about potential law suits.

The last exhibit in this week's gallery of the bizarre offers a welcome break from 9.11. Peculiar posters have been popping up recently all over Berlin, which is holding elections on October 21. The posters depict famous scenes from the Cold War in black and white: an East German soldier grabbing his last chance to jump the Wall before it closes completely; the East German flag and so on. "Berlin Must Not Forget: No Power to the Perpetrators!" is a common caption.

At the very least, the idea here is to keep the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) out of power in Berlin, so one would expect to see the name of some right-wing party unafraid of flying in the face of decade-long efforts to unify the once-divided city. Instead, it's a radio station that takes credit, "Hundert,6." Which is run by one Georg Gafron, "the most powerful media man" in Berlin, according to Der Spiegel. Gafron also runs the local tabloid B.Z., owned by the arch-conservative Springer Verlag, and the television station "TV Berlin," owned by the merely conservative Kirch family.

As Torsten Kleinz reports, Gafron's left-bashing campaign had gone on more or less without comment until he submitted his latest newspaper ad. Below the hammer and sickle, it lists the numbers of those who died trying to escape the GDR, political prisoners, rotten factories, etc. Subtext: Elect a red-red coalition and we're all doomed.

The Berliner Verlag, which publishes the respected Berliner Zeitung and its own tabloid, the not-so-respected Berliner Kurier, decided enough was enough and refused to run the ads. Furious, Gafron published a number to call in protest, leading to a call to the Berliner Verlag managing director. But so far, it's backfired. Most calls have been in support of the publisher's decision. For more, see this report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It's unfortunately not as fun as Kleinz's story, but it is in English.