Green alternative youth

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The Green Alternative Youth (GAJ) was a youth organization in Austria . It was assigned to the party The Greens - The Green Alternative and was its officially recognized youth organization until 2011 and was replaced by the Young Greens (Austria) .

Since 2017 there has been a youth organization of the same name in Vienna , which can be assigned to the party Die Grünen Wien . This belongs to the nationwide youth organization Green Youth - Green Alternative Youth .

organization

The GAJ existed in various federal states and with interruptions from the beginning of the 1990s to 2014. Since 2017 there has been a youth organization of the same name in Vienna again.

The Green Alternative Youth Vienna published the newspaper Suspect several times a year , which has a circulation of around 8,500 copies. The newspaper was also completely available online. By the end of 2006, the GAJ regional organization Upper Austria published the newspaper Kaktus with a circulation of 6000 copies. The cactus has also been appearing regularly since 2009 .

When there were government negotiations between the ÖVP and the Greens in 2002 , the Green Alternative Youth Vienna briefly occupied the Green Club in the National Council in protest against negotiations . The GAJ accused the Green federal spokesman, Alexander Van der Bellen , of blackmailing the party. The GAJ itself interprets the conflict in the area of ​​tension between the party's various ideological roots, classifying itself as belonging to the radical left. The GAJ is based on grassroots democracy. Nationwide, it is based on the GAJ national meetings that take place four times a year. The GAJ has a decentralized structure and tries not to create any hierarchies in the organization. In contrast to many other youth organizations, there is no official membership and no membership fees.

The GAJ Austria was organized at the base in local, district and community groups, which each act autonomously from one another and have the respective national or federal organization as a common umbrella organization. While the first federal organization of the GAJ had even stronger common structures, the later GAJ platform was only a loose association of independent groups.

The second federal organization of GAJ, the GAJ platform, has been involved in various projects with different focuses since it was founded in 2003. In addition, she organized a broad educational program that is also open to non-members. Some parts of the GAJ were very strongly oriented towards the autonomous left and less towards the Greens.

Some actions also meet with criticism from the mother party; So the GAJ 2007 put out a poster with the slogan "Take your flaggerl for your Gaggerl - whoever loves Austria must be shit". Birgit Meinhard-Schiebel then spoke of an "unfortunate story".

history

The first official mention of a GAJ was the founding of the GAJ Vienna on May 10, 1992. In 1993 the GAJ Vorarlberg was founded in Feldkirch as a spin-off from the left-wing alternative youth initiative Pangea, followed by the first federal meeting of the GAJ, at which, however, only the regional organizations Vienna and Vorarlberg participated. In 1994, GAJ Oberösterreich was founded in Garsten near Steyr. This was followed by groups in Carinthia, Wiener Neustadt (Lower Austria), in Pinzgau (Land Salzburg) and briefly in Styria and Burgenland. In Styria and Burgenland there were only individual activists who never really succeeded in developing group activities.

In 1992 the first issue of the GAJ magazine Vorlaut was created, which was discontinued in 2000. Also in that year, the GAJ unexpectedly achieved notoriety throughout Austria, when Jörg Haider , in a television confrontation for the National Council election, presented the then top candidate of the Greens, Madeleine Petrovic , with reports from the Ministry of the Interior, which said that the GAJ (or its regional group in Linz at the time, Junge Left Voice, JLS) allegedly requested material for the construction of letter bombs from Germany. However, that was a false claim.

Of the members of the first generation of the GAJ, only the MP Albert Steinhauser , the Green grassroots activist Charlie Bader and the District Councilor Veronika Reininger are active in the Greens today . Other activists of the 1990s later switched to the SPÖ , KPÖ or the extra-parliamentary left.

In 1995 a permanent nationwide structure was created in addition to the existing federal meetings. Albert Steinhauser , who later became member of the National Council , was elected the first federal spokesperson, Ursula Roschger was elected federal spokesperson with equal rights, and the later political scientist Thomas Schmidinger was elected federal coordinator. The federal spokesperson represented the organization externally, the federal coordinator had a coordinating function for networking the individual state organizations. After Schmidinger's resignation in 1997, this position was no longer filled, which led to a largely autonomous development of various national organizations. In 1996 the GAJ first tried to be admitted to the Federal Youth Council (former Federal Youth Representation). However, this failed because of the Young People's Party , as they saw it as a problem that the green alternative youth had advertised in the TATblatt , a magazine classified as extreme left. In the second attempt, the Young ÖVP demands in return that the Catholic Cartell Association (conservative student association) be accepted. The GAJ refused this offer and decided not to take part in the Federal Youth Council. Shortly afterwards, however, there was a majority in favor of accepting the GAJ. The GAJ joined, the ÖCV did not. The GAJ was represented in the federal youth council until it was replaced by the Young Greens in 2011.

In 1998, the Green Alternative Youth made it into media coverage again in the course of the federal presidential election, when it was declared that they would put up their own candidate for election against the decision of the Green Party. The GAJ announced in advance that it would be an "older woman who comes from the cultural sector, is very well known and who works for the youth". About two weeks after the announcement, the presentation followed at a press conference:

“Because the office of president is superfluous and has to be abolished, the green alternative youth wants to send Pippi Longstocking into the election campaign. Pippi stands for a self-determined life and a rejection of authority. "

In 2001, due to internal ideological differences, a resolution was passed to dissolve the federal GAJ, and in 2002 GAJ Kärnten / Koroska was founded. In 2003, the federal organization from the GAJs of the federal states of Vienna, Vorarlberg and Carinthia was re-established as the GAJ platform , it joined the Association of Young European Greens. In the same year, the Green Youth Styria was reorganized, finally renamed itself like the other GAJs in Green Alternative Youth, but left the platform again in 2008 and has continued to exist as Junge Grüne Steiermark since then . A small member organization of the GAJ existed in Tyrol. The second oldest regional organization, GAJ Vorarlberg, was dissolved in 2009. Instead of them, the FroG - Junge Grüne Plattform was founded in 2008, which has since been renamed Junge Grüne Vorarlberg and has worked with the rival group from Styria and not with the green alternative youth from the start.

The organization Green and Independent Youth Burgenland , which emerged from the GAJ Burgenland in 2004, was part of the GAJ platform; today there is the Young Green Burgenland organization in Burgenland . After violent structural - but less substantive - disputes between the GAJ Vienna and the Young Greens Styria, the GAJ 2011 platform lost the recognition of the Federal Green Party as a youth organization in favor of the Young Greens (Austria) organization founded by the Young Greens Styria . In addition to the Young Greens in Styria, this also includes the Young Greens in Lower Austria, the Young Greens in Burgenland, the Young Greens in Salzburg, the Young Greens in Telfs and the Young Greens in Vorarlberg . The GAJ Vienna was the youth organization recognized and financed by the Vienna Greens until 2014 , before it merged with the already existing district groups of the Young Greens in their federal organization.

After the Young Greens split off from the Greens Austria in 2017, a new youth organization of the Greens has emerged. This runs nationwide under the double name Green Youth - Green Alternative Youth . In Vienna, however, the organization only appears under the name Green Alternative Youth Vienna.

Principles of the GAJ

The GAJ describes itself as grassroots democracy, solidarity, feminist, ecological, anti-fascist, anti-racist, non-violent, anti-national, emancipatory, inclusive, self-determined and anti-capitalist.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Green youth. Retrieved May 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ gajwien.at ( Memento from November 7, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Green alternative youth posters: "Who loves Austria must be shit". In: derstandard.at. December 17, 2007, accessed May 25, 2016 .