Germany’s Greens Party Bitter, Divided in Defeat

The world’s most prominent environmental party has become an endangered species after German voters locked the Greens out of the newly united nation’s first Parliament.

Sunday’s defeat left the Greens stunned, bitter and--as ever--divided.

“It’s a very shocking development,” lamented Petra Kelly, a party co-founder and stepdaughter of an American Army officer.

“We have failed not only in political terms, but in human terms as well,” she said in an interview Monday. “There was so much fighting among ourselves over power and positions and government.”

The Greens collected only 3.9% of the vote, although polls had projected that they stood to win perhaps twice that much. They needed 5% to win parliamentary representation. In the last national election, in 1987, they polled 8.3%.

Through a onetime fluke in election laws, even the successors to the ousted East German Communist Party cleared the 5% hurdle. So did a grab-bag eastern alliance whose ranks include Greens from what was once East Germany. But even the eastern Greens will be able to claim only two of the 656 seats in Parliament.

“That says something, when the follow-up to the old Honecker regime gets twice as many votes as we did,” said Kelly. “This could turn out to be a healthy shock.”

The upset means curtains for their seven-year run as the irreverent off-Broadway ticket in a staid, conservative government. Whether it spells doom for the party altogether remains uncertain.

“It’s a very interesting and important development,” said a Western diplomatic source speaking on condition of anonymity. “Most people had come to visualize the Greens as a permanent fixture.”

The Greens, although “never taken very seriously,” the source said, “still were very much the catalyst in defining voter concerns that were later taken up by the mainstream. That was their undoing.

“Their issues were co-opted.”

Indeed, in a decade that witnessed environmental disasters on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, the Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska and the shrinking Amazon rain forest, the Greens should have blossomed.

“This was supposed to be the time of the Greens,” Kelly said. “The decade of the ‘90s--those were going to be our years. We had been proven right about so many things.”

They first trooped into the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, in 1983, their blue jeans and ponytails offering a splash of irreverence to the somber Bonn chambers.

At the time, NATO was deploying new medium-range nuclear missiles on German soil, and the Greens rode a wave of massive public protest to become Europe’s alternative role model.

But now, the end of the Cold War has made disarmament virtually moot, and mainstream parties have eagerly glommed onto the environmental causes that the Greens championed. The party also embraced feminist, pacifist and various social causes, but never in a single voice.

Internal struggles between the party’s fundamentalists and its more radical members resulted in chaos and a loss of credibility.

For example, when the party recently called a press conference to present “an American deserter” from the Persian Gulf, the guest turned out to be a California student activist who belonged to the Marine reserves, had never been to the gulf, had not been called to active duty and had not even missed one of his mandatory weekends of training.

And the Greens’ latest cause celebre --vociferously opposing German unification--may have proved fatal.

“We fell under the wheels of German unification, of German euphoria,” said Christian Stroebele, the party’s executive spokesman. He said that all other issues--especially issues considered crucial by the Greens, such as global warming--were overshadowed by the whirlwind merger of East and West Germany.

But even the party’s post-election press conference seemed to underline its very weaknesses: divisiveness, lack of organization and a confusing absence of leadership.

Jammed into an overheated, far-too-small room, the Greens had four representatives give rambling and differing reasons for the humiliating defeat. Their mumbled explanations were interrupted by impatient reporters demanding that they speak up.

Many of the Greens’ youthful supporters--one polling institute estimated 600,000--apparently defected to the mainstream Social Democrats, the German opposition party. The Social Democrats, who tried to make the environment their platform, took their worst drubbing at the polls since 1957.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling center-right coalition is expected to quickly form a new government and reaffirm Kohl as leader.

The Greens’ dogged emphasis on issues rather than personalities meant they had no candidate to attach to their campaign.

“Who’s the leader of the Greens?” asked the Western diplomatic source. “The answer is that there is none.”

Analysts remained skeptical of the Greens’ ability to make a comeback, which is certain to dominate the party’s next congress in February. The Greens plan an emergency powwow this weekend to plot a strategy for staying alive in upcoming state and local elections.

There is also a danger that more disenchanted Greens will wander over to the Social Democrats or even to the Communist Party of Democratic Socialism, the scandal-ridden successor to East Germany’s toppled leadership.

Party spokesmen say that membership has remained relatively constant at 42,000 people. Germany has 59.9 million eligible voters.