Paint the Town Green

In moving to Baden-Wuertemberg this year, I am experiencing a little piece of history. You see, B-W is one of Germany's 16 states (I like impressing, or at least thinking I'm impressing, my Germans friends by telling them I can name all 50 U.S. states. Thank you, "Fifty Nifty" song), the one that lies in the southwest corner. With the exception of the wonderful college town of Freiburg, which the Sueddeutsche Zeitung's "Jetzt" blog called the Portland of Germany (actually, they called Portland the Freiburg of America), the state is about as conservative as you can get here in Europe. It was the home of the Pietist movement and is still the closest thing to a Bible belt you'll find in these parts, plus it is a center of industry, boasting top companies like Daimler, Porsche and Bosch. All these combine to make B-W the German equivalent of a red state. Except that in Germany, the red party is actually the Social Democrats, who are the heirs of the socialists and currently their main left-leaning party. The color of the more conservative Christian Democrats is black, perhaps making it the Batman of political parties.

Except that now the Greens are in control. Yes, Green means the same thing here that it does in the States, except that in Germany the Greens are a viable political party. Foreign policy buffs may recall that the Greens even held a national coalition government with the Social Democrats several years ago. Americans may best remember Joschka Fischer, that same government's foreign minister during the Iraq war. During a speech about why he thought the war was not a good idea, he famously switched from German to English when Donald Rumsfeld took off his translator headphones, though I don't know if he actually shouted, "pay attention, Rummy!" In their parliamentary democracy, the dominant left- or right-leaning party usually needs to form a coalition with a smaller party in order to control the government. The Social Democrats like to partner with the Greens to form what nobody except me calls a Christmas tree coalition. The Christian Democrats like to partner with the Free Democrats, the yellows, to form a bumblebee coalition. The Free Democrats are what the Tea Party would be if it were dominated by university intellectuals.

But now the Greens rule Baden-Wuertemberg. Or, more accurately, they are the dominant party of a coalition with the Reds, which is a bit like having Ralph Nader asking Barack Obama to be Vice President. For more bad U.S.-German equivalencies, let me say that the Greens winning in Baden-Wuertemberg is a bit like having the Green party take over Texas. Our (I write "our" saying even though I'm not a citizen, I am a resident with healthcare and Kindergeld) new Minister-President - B-W's governor - is Winfried Kretschmann. Even though he shares a barber with Kim Jong Il, I actually find him to be a sympathetic figure. He's over sixty and comes from a small town in the Swabian Alps, Germany's answer to the Appalachian Mountains. True to the Green roots, he does not want to be known as a Landesvater, or "Father of the State," which is usually a perk of the job, though I don't know exactly what it means. He prefers to be a fellow citizen, who happens to be in charge. He has a strong Swabian accent, which is important as the governor of Mississippi saying "y'all", but he spoke enough high German for me to understand him on the news last night. Unlike pretty much every politician I've seen speak on either side of the Atlantic, he doesn't come across as a salesman. He has a reputation for being pretty even handed and fair and gave more diplomatic answers regarding his pro-bike, pro-train transportation plan (unlike his new transportation minister, who, in an interview with a national newspaper yesterday, called some Porsche-driving as a libido-form of car driving, which probably won't go well here in Germany's motor-city).

How did the Greens take over? I'm not sure exactly, but evidently everyone was upset about a train station, which the Greens bravely stood against because of tree-removal, but the other parties supported, because they had already paid for it. I just came from Washington, where the problems include two wars and a huge debt. It's not bad to move to a place where the biggest problem is a train station.
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