Greens' big dilemma: what happens if they actually win?

Published on Wednesday 20 April 2011 15:25

The astonishing rise of the Greens has given Germany's pro-environment party a new and unexpected problem - does it have anyone who could run the country?

The Greens, founded three decades ago as an anti-nuclear and anti-war party, will be leading the government in one of Germany's 16 states for the first time after winning the election in Baden-Wuerttemberg state last month.

That stunning triumph and the Greens' record-breaking run in opinion polls have stirred talk that the party will have to field a candidate for chancellor for the 2013 election - and one with a chance of winning.

The party would name the chancellor if it emerged from the 2013 election as the largest party in the winning alliance and lead a national coalition for the first time.

This would be a dramatic change from the party's original structure; the Greens began as an anti-party with strict rotation principles and rules barring anyone from holding multiple offices - designed to prevent a concentration of power like that in established parties.

Until now, the party has appeared content to be a junior coalition partner, allied mostly with the Social Democrats (SPD), and never dreamed of picking a candidate for the top job.

Its historic victory in Baden-Wuerttemberg, where it won 24.2 per cent of the vote and beat the SPD (23.2 per cent) for the first time, has changed all that.

The Greens have to think seriously about a chancellor candidate of their own, and seem ill at ease with the notion of concentrating so much power in one person's hands.

"Most people in Germany can't imagine a Green chancellor," said Manfred Guellner, director of the polling institute Forsa.

"But the Greens have been doing so well in polls for so long now that the idea probably wouldn't shock anyone any more."

The Greens have no obvious candidate and have said they will wait until next year before even considering the issue.

For a traditionally small party like the Greens, who have never won more than 10.7 percent of the vote in a national election, picking a chancellor candidate runs the risk of appearing arrogant and could be punished by the voters.

The Free Democrats, another small party, were widely ridiculed in 2002 when for the first time they named a chancellor candidate, Guido Westerwelle. They won a disappointing 7.4 per cent and dropped the idea after that.

The nuclear disaster in Japan has pushed the Greens up to 28 per cent in the latest Forsa poll, ahead of the centre-left SPD (23 per cent) they shared power with from 1998 to 2005.

Surveys in Germany - where fear of nuclear accidents has long been much higher than elsewhere - show a Greens-SPD coalition 17 points ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition.

"The Greens are the party of choice for protest voters," said Mr Guellner."They're the original anti-nuclear party, and that's obviously helping now. They're doing so well because the other parties are making so many mistakes. But who knows if that will last?"