Tossed Salad

The Greens in disarray

One delegate slung a live cat around his neck. Two Bundestag Deputies played soccer in the aisles. From the podium, a man in a clown suit complained that the conference was interfering with Carnival, West Germany's annual spasm of pre-Lenten revelry. A delegate suggested that male candidates for the European Parliament in Strasbourg, whose nomination was the purpose of the meeting, should "undress and present themselves in the nude because the human body reveals political attitudes." Keynote Speaker Antje Vollmer railed against the "industrialized nature-destroying internationalism of neocolonialist nation states." Finally, the proceedings were disrupted by a gang of youths in punk hairdos, who stormed the platform and beat up a photographer.

For West Germany's unconventional Green Party, those antics at its political conference in Karlsruhe's Black Forest convention center were only the most recent evidence of the disarray within its ranks. Launched four years ago as a broad coalition of peace activists, environmentalists and ex-Marxists, the Greens had promised an antiparty party that would rise above the infighting and compromise of traditional politics. Instead, the party has become fragmented, and fighting has broken out among the factions. Some Greens had hoped that the caucus would bring reconciliation. A battle over nominees for election to the European Community's Parliament, however, served merely to deepen the divisions further. Other festering disputes were left unaddressed. Said disappointed Petra Kelly, one of the Greens' leaders: "We'll just have to wait."

Time may be running out. After helping to lead the party's crusade against the installation of American cruise and Pershing II missiles, retired two-star Bundeswehr General Gert Bastian quit the Greens last month, complaining of the creeping influence of the party's Marxist-Leninist faction and "a strong anti-American undertow." Elected last year as one of the party's 28 Green Deputies in the Bundestag, the gray-haired and soft-spoken 60-year-old was one of the few Greens with appeal to middle-class citizens seeking an alternative to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), West Germany's mainstream left-leaning party. Said Bastian of the internal feuding that encouraged him to resign: "In my entire life I have never experienced such an accumulation of distrust."

The chaotic caucus proceedings could only further tarnish the Greens' reputation with moderate voters. Green delegates to the Parliament, declared one speaker, should aim to "put sand in the gears." Well they may. Of the six candidates nominated by the party to stand in national elections to the Parliament this June, four of whom are likely to win seats, one is a Marxist lecturer once active in the radical S.D.S. of the 1960s, and two others have been sentenced to prison terms for publishing articles calling for political violence.

Threats to the Greens' unity come not just from within. Leaders of the SPD have already unleashed a strategy of "smothering the Greens" by co-opting many of the Greens' own issues, especially those concerning the environment. Indeed, weaning away moderate Greens is seen by the SPD as essential to a comeback from its 1983 defeat by Helmut Kohl's ruling coalition. Still, the Greens' worst enemies continue to be themselves. "If the Greens become a party of just young protesters," warns Werner Holzer, editor of the left-of-center Frankfurter Rundschau, "they won't stay in Bonn." For the moment, the Greens may have to concentrate simply on staying together.