Green action future

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GAZ program

The Green Action Future ( GAZ ) was an ecologically oriented party in Germany. The establishment was initiated on July 13, 1978 by the Bundestag member Herbert Gruhl , after he had left the CDU the day before. Gruhl also became federal chairman of the GAZ. It was the first nationwide environmental party. In 1980 she participated in the founding of the GRÜNEN , before she broke away there and founded the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP) with other environmental groups in early 1982 ; thus the GAZ is regarded as the predecessor organization of the ÖDP.

Content profile

The party program was called "The Green Manifesto". It was kept relatively short and contained 30 points. The focus of the program was on the environment. Above all, materialism and economic growth were criticized in it. The latter is described using terms such as "idols [...] that are wrongly called 'economic growth'" and "untenable growth ideology" .

Further demands in the program included the promotion of renewable energies (point 14), the dissolution of the “interdependence of business, parties and authorities” (point 23) as well as global nuclear disarmament (point 29). The family- political part goes back to the child psychotherapist Christa Meves and was perceived and criticized as clearly conservative in opinion-leading media such as Der Spiegel .

history

Foundation and subsequent period (1978/1979)

The Bundestag member Herbert Gruhl was one of the founding fathers of the party. Gruhl had resigned from the CDU immediately before due to irreconcilable differences in environmental policy. As a non-attached member of the Bundestag, he retained his mandate as a member of the GAZ. That is why he is often referred to as the first green member of the Bundestag, even if he was not elected as such. This made the GAZ the first nationwide environmental party. The party's program "The Green Manifesto" attracted a great deal of public attention. Ten days after the federal party, regional associations were founded in Bavaria and Hesse . In the same year, regional associations in North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg followed .

The headquarters of the federal office was Bonn. At the end of March 1979 the party had almost 2,000 members. Within the environmental movement, the GAZ met with divided feedback. Gruhl's concern was to counteract the fragmentation of the movement by founding the party, but other representatives of the environmental movement considered this founding of the party to be a violation of grassroots democratic principles.

The GAZ achieved 0.9% in the state elections in Hesse in 1978, and 1.8% in Bavaria together with the Action Group of Independent Germans (AUD) and citizens' initiatives under the code (short name) Die Grünen . As other electoral associations with ecological goals achieved similar election results, efforts to unite the various parties intensified. On the occasion of the European elections in 1979, the GAZ was involved in the founding of the party alliance Other Political Association Die Grünen , which was able to unite 3.2% of the votes cast.

Participation in the founding of the GRÜNEN and the ÖDP (1980–1982)

The GAZ participated in the founding of the GREEN party in January 1980 , but formally retained its independence. As a conservative wing of the party, the GAZ quickly lost its influence and criticized the dominance of left and communist forces in the party. According to the GAZ, this influence was also reflected in the program adopted in March 1980. In their opinion, too little space was given to the subject of the environment.

In March, the GAZ, together with the Schleswig-Holstein Green List and the Bremen Green List, formed the Working Group on Ecological Policy for the Greens (AGÖP), which was supposed to form a kind of internal party opposition and a counterpoint to the left wing of the Greens. At the party congress on March 21 to 23 in Saarbrücken, the GAZ made its continued existence within the party dependent on the question of whether the issue of "ecology" would be the focus of the upcoming federal election .

When at the GREEN party conference in Dortmund on 21./22. June 1980 the left forces prevailed against the conservative values ​​of the GREENS, the GAZ withdrew. She then formed the Green Federation with critical environmental groups on July 16 of the same year , which was a loose association with the aim of founding a party and was later renamed the Ecological Federation . Some time later, the Hamburg Green List joined this "federation". In 1980 and 1981, the contributors gradually left the GREEN. On October 10th and 11th, 1981, a so-called “representatives' meeting” took place in Frankfurt am Main . On this the course was set for the foundation of a new ecological party.

The “successor” of the GAZ was the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP) , which Herbert Gruhl co-founded in January 1982 and which he led until 1989 . The last state party congress of the GAZ in Bavaria on October 17 and 18, 1981 was already the founding party congress of the Bavarian state association of the ÖDP; The federal party was founded three months later. In the GAZ there was hardly a politically distinguished person apart from Herbert Gruhl during this phase of realignment. "Politics is a craft ..." that could also be clear to a GAZ colleague in 1981, "where you have to bring certain qualifications and there seemed to be a lack of such people".

literature

  • Götz Fenske: Encounters with Carl Amery and Herbert Gruhl , in: Naturkonservativ 2008/2009 . Edited by the Herbert Gruhl Society. Bad Schussenried 2009, ISBN 978-3-87336-904-7 , pp. 90-110; (Excerpt from: [1] on naturkonservativ.de)
  • Jean Fuchs: The green betrayal. Decline of a vision . The Blue Owl, Essen 2005, ISBN 3-89924-115-0 .
  • Herbert Gruhl: Survival is everything. Memories . Herbig, Munich / Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-7766-1457-9 .
  • Volker Kempf: Herbert Gruhl - pioneer of environmental sociology. In the field of tension between scientific knowledge and political reality . Ares-Verlag , Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-902475-47-3 .
  • Raphael Mankau (Ed.): 20 years of ödp - beginnings, present and perspectives of ecological-democratic politics . dolata verlag, Rimpar 1999, ISBN 3-344-70790-6 .
  • Makoto Nishida: Flows in the Greens (1980-2003): An analysis of informally organized groups within the Greens , LIT, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-9174-7
  • Jürgen Wüst: Conservatism and the ecological movement. An investigation into the tension between party, movement and ideology using the example of the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP) . IKO - Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-88939-275-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klein, Falter: The long way of the Greens. Munich 2003, p. 38.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g The green manifesto. Program of the “Green Action Future” (1978) ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.herbert-gruhl.de
  3. ↑ Christa Meves: Ad memoriam Herbert Gruhl. In: Conservative today. Yearbook of the Herbert-Gruhl-Gesellschaft eV 2003, Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2003, p. 99–100, here p. 100
  4. ^ So Ludger Volmer : Die Grünen , Munich 2009, p. 15.
  5. ↑ Gruhl, p. 201f
  6. ↑ Edgar Guhde, in: Mankau, p. 17
  7. ↑ Gruhl, p. 204
  8. ↑ a b Edgar Guhde, in: Mankau, p. 19
  9. ^ Wüst, p. 111f
  10. ↑ a b c d Edgar Guhde, in: Mankau, p. 23
  11. ↑ Kempf, pp. 160, 288
  12. ↑ Michael Arends , in: Mankau, p. 63
  13. ↑ Fenske, p. 98