Party politics and the environmentbase, and to the Left, with the Greens attracting the progressive post-
materialist middle classes. The need to reconcile the aspirations and inter-
ests of these different constituencies posed a fundamental dilemma for the
SPD: should it move rightwards to win back its core working-class supporters,
or leftwards to counter the threat from the Greens (Scarrow 2004 : 92–95).
These tensions produced shifting SPD attitudes towards the green challenge,
fluctuating from periods of co-operation and assimilation to bouts of non-
co-operation and active opposition towards a party that many in the SPD
regarded as irresponsible and unreliable.
By the mid-1990s, the SPD could no longer rule out the prospect of a red–
green coalition because it offered the most realistic means of halting the
long CDU tenure under Chancellor Kohl. Apart from this electoral impera-
tive, several other factors encouraged the SPD to stop treating the Greens
as maverick outsiders (Smith 1996 : 66–7; Lees 2000 ). The bottom line was
that the SPD felt less directly threatened by the Greens, whose national
electoral support seemed to have stabilised at a level well below what once
seemed possible (Scarrow 2004 : 94). The success of SPD–Green coalitions in
theL ̈ander, where it became clear that the two parties could ‘do business’,
encouraged a more co-operative approach. There was also considerable pol-
icy convergence between the two parties. SPD opposition to environmental-
ism weakened and the party adopted a stronger postmaterialist programme,
including policies on nuclear power, gender equality and reform of citizen-
ship laws (Markovits and Gorski 1993 : 268–71; Lees 2000 ). Meanwhile, the
ascendancy of the Realists heralded a considerable moderation of Green
policies and institutional practices. By 1998, the party programmes of the
SPD and the Greens shared so much common ground on key policies that
ared–green coalition was clearly preferable to a SPD–CDU ‘grand coalition’
(Lees 2000 ). The success of the Greens was therefore critical in compelling
established German parties, especially the SPD, to treat environmental issues
more seriously.
It is important though not to overestimate the extent of party politicisa-
tion of the environment. Ironically, the Greens entered office just when their
electoral fortunes seemed to have plateaued and the saliency of the envi-
ronmental issue had diminished. Economic recession and the tumultuous
impact of German unification pushed the environment down the political
agenda during the 1990s, illustrated by the decreasing amount of space
allocated to the environment by the established parties in their 1994 and
1998 federal election manifestos (Budge et al. 2001 ). They became more cir-
cumspect about advocating progressive environmental policies; for example,
both the CDU and SPD moderated their support for a carbon tax because
of the possible threat to jobs. The Greens were able to insist that key envi-
ronmental issues, notably nuclear power, were addressed by the red–green
government. At the 2002 federal election, Schr ̈oder and Fischer skilfully
linked the dramatic floods that summer to climate change and presented
the coalition government as the most effective for dealing with the problem.