You Can Smell It in the Air

There's a big meeting of the Green Party players of Germany this weekend.  Folks are pretty peppy and excited....they've got the best poll numbers that they've seen in decades.  There's a internal belief that they could pull twenty percent in a national election.  Naturally, they'd be taking the plus-up from the SPD party who are confronting a serious loss of public support in the past year.

For the Green's, it's a double-edged sword.  They've become this magnet for public support now, and they would admit in public forums that they've moved slightly to the center to get some of that support.  They aren't as "green" as they were five years ago.  In a way, they are losing part of their charm and character.  Yes, they are becoming like the other political organizations that talk about being 'green' but aren't quiet that 'green'.

If you go back to the early seventies, the Greens were this far left political group with a dozen agendas and nothing much else.  They never had any real clear economic agendas....or agendas related to retirement....or agendas related to jobs in Germany.

There is a evolution going on in Germany today.  The Greens, the Linke Party (the far left Commies), and the SPD party.....have all flipped themselves into a odd group of identification.  To be honest, there's not that much of a big difference between all three.  If they combined themselves....they'd easily take fifty percent of the vote in the next election.  I'm guessing the Greens really don't want to hear that.

Somewhere off in the distance of the Green party....is a fairly radical group of Greens....who really hate this centralist view that the party has taken.  I'm guessing in five years that they will upset enough....to pack up and leave the party, and then create a new Green party for the far left....to make five percent of the population happy with radical Green political policies.

So folks will be smiling at this weekend meeting but they know there's a limit to this success. There's a change coming.