From the early Greens to the AfD: An analysis of radicalization and moderation

In the beginning, things were colorful and radical for the Greens. Reports from the early years are full of absurdities. There were the “Goa freaks” who paralyzed the party conferences with motions as “rules of procedure artists”. Greens discussed whether a party conference in a city hall should be canceled because there was only artificial lighting there. Others had to prevent members of a Nuremberg city Indian community from causing chaos. There were commoners in traditional jackets and punks with Mohawks.

The early Greens were extremely heterogeneous in terms of their ideology. In the search for a policy to overcome the growth society and to save nature, conservatives, undogmatic leftists, anthroposophists, representatives of a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, members of K groups, Marxists and supporters of neutralist-nationalist ideas came together.

This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The Green Party chronicler Hubert Kleinert writes: “In the period that followed, these actually antagonistic world views among the Greens were held together, in addition to everyday political pragmatism, by all sorts of formulaic compromises and less precise ideas about a third way.” Due to the advance of “hippie values,” many Greens quickly said goodbye to Karl Marx and turned to the left-wing Hegelian Max Stirner.

How could such a chaotic bunch ever become a force that was even remotely capable of governing? And would this also be conceivable for the AfD – as the state-supporting party of a new bourgeoisie?

The Mainz historian Andreas Rödder believes so. With his think tank Republik21, he has positioned himself clearly to the right of the old CDU mainstream and is one of the opponents of the firewall. The Greens' early participation in government led to moderation, he says: "The Greens had sympathizers from the RAF environment and a violent demonstrator scene against the West Runway; parts of the party questioned the state's monopoly on violence. The coalition with the SPD under Holger Börner created a directional debate between Realos and Fundis, so moderation was politically rewarded."

Rödder believes that early involvement would also have been a better approach for the AfD. Politicians like the former CSU Federal Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich are willing to follow him: "The right thing would have been to force the AfD to take responsibility and let it show its colors in everyday political life. Then the party would have had to show its true face much earlier," he says.

Was it really participation in government that tamed the Greens?

Such theses raise two questions: Was it actually the Greens' participation in government in Hesse that led to moderation, or were they early programmatic basic beliefs that were better suited to the Federal Republic than the AfD's ideology? And if you follow the thesis: When would have been the right time to make the AfD an offer of moderation by participating in the government?

Just three years after their founding, the Greens entered the Bundestag. And just four years later, the Social Democrat Holger Börner was elected by them as Prime Minister of Hesse – in a minority government. The AfD is now 13 years old and has not yet been involved in a state government, although it is now represented in every state parliament with the exception of the Bremen citizenship and the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein and is the strongest faction in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt.

One of the co-founders of the Green Party is Winfried Kretschmann. A few months ago he moved from the Villa Reitzenstein, the state chancellery of the Baden-Württemberg government, a few meters away to the Villa Clay, where he is now writing speeches with a few employees and thinking about the recent election results and the Germans' new inclination towards extremism. Cem Özdemir, the second Green Prime Minister of the Republic, is now sitting at Kretschmann's old desk and is trying to lead the country through the difficult car crisis. You can't get much more green state responsibility than these two.

Kretschmann remembers the early years of his party. In the 1980s he was part of Joschka Fischer's government team as a ministerial councilor. "Actually, the differences between the early phase of the Greens and today's AfD are striking: We had no theses about destroying parliamentary democracy; the word 'tolerance' was in the preamble of the basic program of 1980. Back then, we wanted a gentle republic, which means that permanent polarization was not part of our policy. The Greens also thought from the bottom up and not from the top down like the AfD." That means, says Kretschmann, they wanted to change politics with the people and not “clean up” and “destroy” other parties.

“There was no destructive or regressive mood”

The Greens were not anti-science, but rather fought for more plurality in science. "There was no destructive or regressive mood among the Greens back then, but rather an exuberance of alternative ideas. They wanted to do everything in the world differently and better. The Greens invented something new: nature as politics, today we call it ecological politics," says Kretschmann. The AfD, on the other hand, wants to go back: to a Europe before Adenauer, to the combustion engine, to the ideal image of a bygone Germany.

Kretschmann has nothing to gain from the comparison between the early phase of his party and the AfD: "Human rights and minority protection were the highest principle for the Greens, thanks to Petra Kelly. That paved access to the Federal Republic. In this respect, we were never at war with the core of the Basic Law and Article 1 at the beginning." As early as 1985, Kretschmann was campaigning for coalitions with the SPD at the federal level. Of course, Joschka Fischer also contributed greatly to taming the Fundis in the party.

Silke Mende, a historian in Heidelberg, wrote the book “Not right, not left, but ahead” about the founding history of the Greens. It examines the party's programmatic formation process. Mende believes it is wrong to speak of “de-radicalization”: “As far as one can compare the developments of the Greens and the AfD, it is clear that the parliamentarization of the Greens has led relatively quickly to a rapprochement with the Federal Republican consensus, while the AfD has become increasingly radicalized since its founding and often only uses parliament as a stage.”

The minutes of the first parliamentary group show how early the Greens found their way onto the normal path of parliamentary democracy. First, they tried to tie their representatives closely to the grassroots movements in accordance with the Sindelfingen resolutions with “federal working groups” and “regional offices” and the “rotation principle” and public parliamentary group meetings. But with the appointment of Michael Vesper as managing director of the Bundestag faction, a “professionalization push” began, as the scientists Josef Boyer and Helge Heidemeyer write, which could hardly have been “bigger”.

The Greens did not want to push the SPD off the map

"The Greens," says Mende, "were skeptical about parliamentary democracy, but at the same time they were parliamentary model students. They were not interested in unmasking or even dismantling the political system. The focus was on improving and supplementing it, for example through grassroots democratic instruments such as the rotation system." Unlike the AfD's intentions with the Union, the Greens' goal was never to push another party, such as the SPD, off the political map. They were more interested in convincing young SPD members of the importance of ecology. Mende also sees the Greens' implicit view of humanity as the basis for a quick rapprochement with the political system: "Instead of being about constraints, it should be about people. If you look at the Greens' view of humanity, you will notice that people should be protected, for example from nuclear power or environmental toxins. Group-based misanthropy had no place."

The idea of ​​co-determination developed from the Greens’ “pronounced cult of concern”. “This resulted in a pluralistic understanding of society.” The Greens were “not great philosophers,” but the majority of them referred to the Enlightenment view of humanity: “It was about informed and self-determined people and an understanding of progress and science in which the focus was not on economics and growth, but on people.”

The biggest hurdle on the way to acceptance by the other parties was probably the Fundis' attitude to the state's monopoly on violence. They approved of violence against things as a means of resistance, while the Realos only wanted to practice non-violent civil disobedience. The program of the early Greens did not contradict the constitution. The historian of ideas Jens Hacke, co-author of Wolfgang Schäuble's autobiography, also sees it this way: "The prerequisites for the Greens' system integration were completely different, so there is little that can be learned from them today. At that time, the Union, SPD and FDP told the Greens: If you accept the order of the Basic Law, you can join us. That was also the unanimous opinion of the voters of these parties. In some cases, the Greens even wanted to be the better constitutional patriots."

The AfD, on the other hand, is dealing with a party that “obviously has little or no interest in our normative value structure and the Basic Law.” Hacke also emphasizes that the party's policy offer only consists of a return to the past: Russian gas, low defense spending and an ethnically homogeneous nation.

Cooperation with the AfD only in the municipalities?

Hacke says: Although one will have to talk to the party's district administrators and local councilors, there is a lack of a basis of values ​​for any further cooperation between the Union and the AfD.

At what point should politicians from the Union or SPD have made an offer to the AfD to persuade them to moderate? As early as late summer 2014, the first regional associations had decided to move towards right-wing populism and break away from economic liberalism. Since the “Erfurt Resolution” was passed in the same year, the influence of the Thuringian state chairman Björn Höcke has steadily increased. Today he is one of the clearly right-wing extremist politicians in the AfD.

Already at the beginning of 2015, the support of the moderate AfD politicians within the party was rapidly dwindling, even before the refugee crisis began. At the 2015 Essen party conference, Bernd Lucke was unable to assert his “Wake-Up Call 2015” to move away from right-wing extremism and was voted out. A fifth of the members left the party, including celebrities such as Hans-Olaf Henkel and Joachim Starbatty. At that time, the AfD was already sitting in the state parliaments of Saxony, Brandenburg, Thuringia, Hamburg and Bremen.

What should an offer of moderation have looked like? Should the Saxon CDU, with its result of almost 40 percent, have formed a coalition with the AfD just because the FDP had missed re-entry into the state parliament? In 2017, Höcke described the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” in a speech. Previously, the Baden-Württemberg AfD parliamentary group leader Jörg Meuthen had failed in a bitter dispute to exclude the anti-Semitic MP Wolfgang Gedeon from the state parliamentary group.

The eco-socialists remained with the Greens until 1990

The thesis of cooperation for the purpose of moderation is also doubtful with regard to the Greens. The quickly failed participation in the government in Hesse did not mean that the Realos were able to assert themselves. It was not until 1990 that the eco-socialists Rainer Trampert and Thomas Ebermann left the Greens. Many Greens from the founding generation had previously reached the limits of their extra-parliamentary involvement in citizens' initiatives. "Parliamentarization appeared here as a way out of a political dead end. The moment the Greens sat in parliament, they also used parliamentary means and did technical work," says Mende.

The AfD lacked the programmatic starting points for moderation; key players had turned radical just two years after its founding. Hacke is also pessimistic about the AfD's future development because social conditions are different today than they were in the early 1980s: "The AfD's willingness to change and adapt to a normative framework of values is low. This is also because German society hardly rallies behind this framework of values when the AfD gets 40 percent results. Because it is constantly accepted that this party crosses red lines, there is no pressure from the society to which it belongs could motivate change.”