The Conservatives’ New Favorite Color

But the most pressing reason for the shift is necessity—and here it may have the most lasting effect on German politics. This alliance is part of the realignment of German politics following the growth of the radically left-wing, populist Linkspartei. Because the vote is now divided between five parties—the CDU, SPD, Greens, Linkspartei and the pro-business Free Democrats—it has become ever harder for one party to rule alone, or even with its one traditional small-party ally. What's more, with the implosion of the Social Democrats (the Greens' traditional allies) to only 25 percent in a mid-May poll, the Greens are abandoning what seems, for now, a rapidly sinking ship. Of course, there's no guarantee the Hamburg experiment will succeed either. Most Green voters would prefer to share power with the Linkspartei and SPD, rather than the conservatives. But at least for the moment, the Green leadership is resisting because it is reluctant to tie its fortunes to a struggling SPD—and it fears joining up with the rabble-rousing far left will return the party to the fringe-movement ghetto from which they've worked so hard to escape.

One question is whether the Hamburg alliance could be a harbinger of things to come even beyond Germany's borders. After all, environmentalism became mainstream in Germany long before the climate-change debate put it on the international agenda. And it was a conservative government—Helmut Kohl's—that set up the country's first Ministry for the Environment back in 1986. Could the rest of the world again follow Germany's example? Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, a professor at Lüneburg University who has studied Green movements for 25 years, says Green-conservative coalitions have emerged in a handful of other governments, including Ireland and France, and argues this melding is a natural process that is long overdue. "I've been telling the Greens since the 1980s that their issues—environmentalism, individualism, grass-roots decision-making—are at heart conservative issues," he says.

In Germany, coalitions like the one in Hamburg have fomented much talk of a new post-ideological age. Petersen says the Green-conservative rapprochement may signal the end of the confrontational post-1968 culture wars that have so sharply polarized the political debate. "People are sick of clinging to political positions that might have been right 30 years ago but have been overcome by reality today," von Beust said of his new coalition in a mid-May interview with Die Zeit. If this kind of attitude empowers the pragmatists and problem solvers in the political parties, then Hamburg's newfangled alliance will prove to be truly radical.

© 2008