Ljubljana

Those wrinkles are multiplying and getting deeper. Not even Claudia Roth and Jürgen Trittin, both in their mid fifties, will be spared. The leadership figures of the Greens who took office 30 years ago to stir up the greying establishment are now facing retirement age themselves.

Back then, in March 1983, when they first ran for office in a Bundestag election and made it into the Bundestag with 5.6 percent of the votes, they embodied the youthful rebels against established structures. The Greens provoked and broke social taboos. They came in sneakers and with no respect for conventions and older gentlemen. Joschka Fischer’s outburst during the Flick donations scandal is legendary. “If I may say so, Mr President, you are an asshole,” he said to then president of the parliament Richard Stücklen. The statement caused an uproar of outrage and made history. Almost 30 years later, in March 2012, the same man, who in the meantime wears finest threads in place of jeans, had to cancel a speaking engagement in Switzerland because left-extremists threatened to throw tomatoes and eggs.

Joschka Fischer’s pathway from street fighter to minister in sneakers to elegantly dressed consultant of the energy industry is only symptomatic of the evolution of the party to a certain extent. The best-known and most high profile representative that the Greens ever produced always had a difficult relationship to his party. They needed one another – Joschka and the Greens – but never really loved one another. Today, the face of the party is characterized by people like Winfried Kretschmann, minister president in Baden-Württemberg, or Katrin Goering-Eckhardt, one of the two leading candidates in the Bundestag elections in autumn. They are both green and avowed middle-class in one.

Kretschmann, like Fischer, was a Green of the first hour; the two trod part of the pathway together. When Fischer was elected the first Green minister in the state of Hesse in 1985, Kretschmann was his policy advisor. He, too, was once a wild young man, he, too, is a child of the ’68 movement, but unlike Fischer, when he put aside pot and fundamental opposition Kretschmann did not reach immediately for an Armani suit. Kretschmann is a member of a traditional shooting club, sings in the choir of the Catholic church and is still married to his first wife. Kretschmann is not one to polarize.

Just like Katrin Goering-Eckhardt, the woman who emerged as the surprise victor last year at the first election by direct vote of leading candidates. Not the Bundestag parliamentary group chair Renate Künast, known for her big mouth, was elected, nor was it in-your-face Claudia Roth, one of the two national chairpersons. The two favourites had to make way for a woman who is the praeses of the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany and is considered reserved and understated.

So, after thirty years of parliamentary work, the Greens have completely lost their enfant terrible status. Words like “decency” and “morals” come up in their arguments and no one flinches. But it is not just the Greens who have changed, but society, too. The no-nukes freaks first conquered society, and then the CDU and the government, which led to the energy transition in Germany in 2011. The women’s quota – another favourite topic of the Greens – is now embraced by people in the conservative CDU, most prominently Labour Minister Ursula von der Leyen. While the Greens became more and more middle class, the middle class became more and more green. Does this mean the time has come for a black and green coalition at the national level?

Arithmetically, no other majority is imaginable at the moment. Yet the leading politicians of both parties remain silent about such a possibility. None of them wants to frighten off their core voters if they can help it. But perhaps opening up this option is just as unavoidable as the wrinkles on the faces of Claudia Roth and Jürgen Trittin.