Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [23]
Cohn-Bendit was a leader in France’s student uprising in 1968 (the French government later tossed him out) and is co-president of the Greens party’s European faction. He’s still very much a grass-roots type of Green, and you often glimpse him on the street in Frankfurt’s Bockenheim district. Joschka Fischer, one-time foreign minister, taxi driver and son of a butcher (of German ancestry, but from Hungary) earned notoriety for his time as a member of a Putzgruppe (clean-up mob), who battled it out with police in squatter clashes in Frankfurt’s Westend. Ironically, this elegant and, in parts, upmarket suburb today owes its existence to the rebel squatters who fought tooth and nail to stop the bulldozers in the 1970s. Fischer is alleged to have punched a policeman in one violent clash (in an odd twist of fate, the policeman’s surname was Marx). After a highly popular stint as Germany’s foreign minister from 1998 to 2005, Fischer – five times married and, witty tongues might quip, the only Greens politician to practice his party’s principle of leadership rotation – has now retired from parliament.
Given the party’s provenance, an SPD shade of light red would seem the preferred colour of the Greens. Although it has yet to join forces with conservative parties at state or federal level, the Greens are no strangers to coalitions with ‘black’ (conservative) parties in city governments. In Hamburg, the Grün-Alternative Liste (Green Alternative List; GAL), a party that is not strictly the Greens but represents Alliance 90/The Greens in that state, is currently in a coalition with the CDU. Now even the conservative parties, once the mortal enemies of the movement, are openly talking about federal coalitions if need be. The atomic energy issue, however, is one where the attraction cools somewhat. Following the election of 2009, which saw the party receive almost 11% of the vote, the Greens declared their intention to fight in opposition any attempt to reverse laws it helped pass to phase out nuclear-power stations by 2020.
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Something had to give, and it did. With the demonstrations spreading and escalating into violence, Erich Honecker accepted the inevitable, relinquishing his position to Egon Krenz (b 1937). And then the floodgates opened: on the fateful night of 9 November, 1989, party functionary Günter Schabowsky informed GDR citizens they could travel directly to the West. Tens of thousands of East Germans jubilantly rushed through border points in Berlin and elsewhere in the country, bringing to an end the long, chilly phase of German division.
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ANGELA MERKEL – THE ENIGMATIC CHANCELLOR
Some say that she’s enigmatic; others, that she likes to keep a low profile when political dissonance breaks out, especially within her own party. Indisputable, however, is that Angela Merkel’s rise to become German chancellor in 2005 brought a number of firsts. She was Germany’s first woman and first former East German in the job and, because of the latter, she also became the first Russian-speaking German chancellor.
Merkel was born in Hamburg in 1954 but grew up in the boondocks – in the Uckermark region (in Brandenburg, near the Polish border), where her father had a posting as a pastor in East Germany. She studied physics in Leipzig (quantum chemistry), entering politics as the GDR was falling apart. Soon she was honing her political skills in the ministries of a reunified Germany (Women and Youth was one; Environment, Natural Protection and Reactor Safety was another) under Helmut Kohl, which is why she’s sometimes called ‘Kohl’s foster child’. Her breakthrough came in the late 1990s when the reputations of several CDU high-flyers suffered as a result