On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Dennis Redmond wrote:
> The rump of the SPD, alas, has been thoroughly neoliberalized, and is
> responsible for some truly toxic social legislation.
>
> For years, the more radical unions and the Greens weren't happy about
> this, but figured there wasn't much they could do about it.
Dennis, I'm curious. Most people in Germany seem to consider the Greens to the right of the SPD when it comes to neoliberalism. It's this very quality that makes a Schwampel coalition thinkable. Do you disagree?
The Greens are definately to the left when it comes to citizenship law, gay marriage and the environment -- which are arguably the only areas where anything notably good has happened in the last seven years domestically. But Greens in general -- at least as they've been publicly represented the last 10 years -- seem quite viscerally antagonistic to unions and enthusiastic about labor reforms. And they don't seem to have any union base to worry about offending -- which even the CDU has to worry about.
These are of course German Greens I'm talking about, not American Greens, and certainly not you, who are both a radical unionist and a Green.
Michael