> Most people in Germany seem to consider the Greens to
> the right of the SPD when it comes to neoliberalism.
The German Greens are a complex range of personalities and beliefs -- socialistic and Left-leaning, on the whole. Much of the SPD's apparent antagonism to neoliberalism is more about defending the specific interests of German industrial capital than combating capital worldwide. In practice, what's happened is that the SPD regularly proposes a raft of repulsively neoliberal legislation, the CDU and FDP howl in mock protest (while eventually voting for the same stuff anyway), while the worst of the new legislation gets torpedoed by a loose alliance of Greens and progressive SDPers.
The Greens have also scored some successes in terms of (1) a reasonably sane foreign policy and (2) renewable energy.
> And they don't seem to have any union base to worry about offending --
> which even the CDU has to worry about.
There are some interesting links between the more radical service-sector unions and IG Metall and the Greens.
-- DRR