Alive and Well into the Fourth Decade of Their Bundestag Presence: A Tally of the Greens' Impact on the Federal Republic of Germany's Political Life and Public Culture

Abstract

The Greens' impact on German politics and public life has been enormous and massively disproportional to the size of their electoral support and political presence in the country's legislative and executive bodies on the federal, state, and local levels. After substantiating the Greens' proliferating presence on all levels of German politics with numbers; the article focuses on demonstrating how the Greens' key values of ecology, peace and pacifism, feminism and women's rights, and grass roots democracy—the signifiers of their very identity—have come to shape the existence of all other German parties bar none. If imitation is one of the most defining characteristics of success, the Greens can be immensely proud of their tally over the past thirty plus years.