Alliance 90/The Greens

The German green party, formed from the 1980 Greens and the 1990 East German citizen movements.

Overview

Die Grunen entered the Bundestag in 1983 with a strident ecological and pacifist program, the first new party to do so in decades. Reunification brought the merger with Alliance 90, the East German civil rights groups of 1989. Joschka Fischer led the party into federal office in 1998 as foreign minister, accepting the Kosovo war and breaking pacifist taboos. Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister and Robert Habeck as economics minister governed from 2021. The party pairs climate transition, renewable energy leadership, and civil liberties with pragmatic coalition experience at every level, and set the global template for green parties entering power rather than protesting it.