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Alliance 90/The Greens: A Left Party with a Centrist Appeal in Coalition Politics

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The Legacy and Impact of German Unification

Part of the book series: New Perspectives in German Political Studies ((NPG))

Abstract

Alliance 90/The Greens scored a historic result in the federal election in 2021, which subsequently helped them to form a SPD-led coalition government jointly with the FDP. This chapter investigates the reasons for this ascent and asks if this connotes a temporary shift or a new phase for the party. The analysis compares electoral results on different levels and traces the programmatic evolution with a focus on the most recent basic program and election manifesto. It describes the unique organizational characteristics (e.g., collective leadership) and how the legacy of a grassroots movement plays out. It illustrates how the overall moderation of the party is visible in the behavior of the parliamentary group and how the participation in the traffic-light coalition with SPD and FDP is the result of an incremental coalition strategy based on party congress motions and experiments in the states. The analysis points to a sustained gain in importance of the Greens in Germany that speaks to a transformation of the party system.

The author would like to thank Sabine Lang, Morgan Wack and Nicholas Wittstock for their helpful comments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This had ramifications for the party organization as well. Learning from the short-lived Pirate Party and their experiments with new methods of online deliberation (i.e., liquid feedback and liquid democracy; Thuermer, 2021) the Greens pushed their own tools for collaboration and organizing party congresses. Because of the Corona pandemic the party congress for the ratification of the basic program itself was organized digitally.

  2. 2.

    For the purpose of this analysis the first legislative period after reunification (1990–1994) is excluded from our analysis because the small group of eight representatives for eastern Germany was less representative of the party as a whole. Furthermore, when taking into account the logic of parliamentary systems where the government rests on the parties making up the coalition in the Bundestag, there is no need to include these data for that period of time from 1998 to 2005. The party typically supports government proposals coming from their own coalition. True to their alternative style of politics there were some exceptions, the most prominent regarding the use of military force, where a small group of Greens parliamentarians voted against its own government (Biermann, 2004, pp. 614–615).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Niko Switek

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  1. Niko Switek
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Correspondence to Niko Switek .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Passau, Passau, Germany

    Michael Oswald

  2. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    John Robertson

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Switek, N. (2022). Alliance 90/The Greens: A Left Party with a Centrist Appeal in Coalition Politics. In: Oswald, M., Robertson, J. (eds) The Legacy and Impact of German Unification. New Perspectives in German Political Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97154-0_7

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