The stars have aligned for Germany’s Greens

THE STORY of Germany’s Greens is a series of once-per-decade eruptions. Forty years ago an eccentric band of environmentalists, peaceniks and anti-nuclear activists gathered in Karlsruhe to set up a political party. In the early 1990s, after the party stumbled by failing to back German reunification, it merged with civil-society groups in the former east, yielding a clunky name that survives today: Alliance 90/The Greens. In 1998 the party joined Germany’s federal government serving for seven years as junior partner to Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats (SPD). In 2011, surging in polls after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, they took control of their first German state: Baden-Württemberg, in the rich south-west, where Winfried Kretschmann, a communist-turned-centrist, remains the Green premier today. Now a fifth eruption is looming.