By Ralph T. Niemeyer
The German Green Party has come a long way from a pacifist anti – NATO anti – nuclear power movement to be now in the center of German politics. It began in 1983, when the West-German Green Party entered the Bundestag for the first time. Leaders such as former Bundeswehr General Gert Bastian and Petra Karin Kelly fiercely fought against NATO cruise missile deployment in West-Germany and were accused by conservatives, liberals and social democrats as to be financed by Moscow.
But, Joschka Fischer, once one of the most radical leftists and first minister of environment in a German federal state following the Chernobyl nuclear power accident, changed in office quite a bit, calling it the “march through the institutions” that eventually made him become the first ever green foreign minister of Germany in 1998 advocating German participation in NATO’s war over Kosovo in 1999 thus ending the self-imposed restriction of post – WWII Germany saying that one shouldn’t ever “let Auschwitz happen again”. It had been this brutal intellectual volt to employ the victims of the Holocaust for political gain that almost split the Green Party but in the end it became it’s new paradigm.
By that time, Petra Kelly was already 7 years dead, killed by her life partner, Gert Bastian who committed suicide the same moment in despair over the course the party had taken. It can be assumed that Petra Kelly had agreed to her death.
Now, since Germany is preparing for a major political change after 16 years of the reign of Chancellor Angela Merkel, opinion polls suggest that Green “candidate for Chancellor” Annalena Baerbock could oust Mrs. Merkel by forming a coalition government with the Christian Conservative Union, the foreign policy shift of the Greens towards Russia becomes a controversy. The Greens 40 years after Petra Kelly are no longer in any business with Russia but rather the opposite. Green party co-chairman Robert Habeck demanded arms delivery to Ukraine in order to fight against pro-Russian seperatists in the Donbass region.
After even current foreign minister Heiko Maas, a social democrat who usually also is not shy to criticise Russia for the handling of the Navalny-case, denied approval for arms delivery to Kiev, Mr. Habeck clarified that he meant it should only be for “self-defense”.
The Leftist leader Sahra Wagenknecht immediately rebuked that by saying that it was against the German arms export law to send any weapons to crisis areas and that especially the fascist movements in Ukraine gave further reason also in lieu of the fact that German history was well and alive in that conflict meaning that the rise of the Bandera-commemorations were extremely worrisome.
