Flood buoys Germany's left
One month before elections, the country's Green Party has inched up in opinion polls.
As the swarthy flood waters of the River Elbe drain into the North Sea, Germans are just beginning to calculate the enormous costs of this summer's catastrophe.
It's estimated that Europe's biggest economy will spend more than $10 billion on the clean-up operation. But for Germany's center-left government, there are already signs of a political windfall. Though still trailing in the polls, the government's handling of the floods and the environmental concerns raised by them have buoyed its prospects in next month's elections.
In fact, the public's newfound concern for the country's environmental well-being may stave off the demise of the beleaguered Green Party, the government's junior coalition partner.
"We feel vindicated," Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and the highest ranking Green member in the government, said on a televised talk show this week.
For the first time during this summer's campaign, the ruling Social Democrats and the Greens are on the offensive. For years, the Greens have warned Germans about the consequences of global warming, about urban overdevelopment, and the benefits of alternative energy sources. Now, the environmentalists are milking their standard issues for all they are worth.
The Greens have pushed so forcefully of late that other parties have even accused it of opportunism and schadenfreude at a time of national anguish.
Across Europe and Russia, flooding in recent weeks is responsible for the deaths of at least 97 people. The floods have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes, ruined harvests, and destroyed buildings and roads. In Germany alone, 15 people have died and 25 are missing.
But Mr. Fischer denied there is any Green glee over the disaster. "It doesn't surprise me to hear [critics say] this. The opposition is worried that our government's achievements will now be seen in another light."
The so-called Red-Green coalition has pushed through an array of ground-breaking ecological legislation over the past four years. Germany, for example, is phasing out nuclear power. New standards have upgraded one of Europe's most comprehensive recycling regimes. At the center of the campaign debate, a controversial "ecological tax" has been slapped on fossil fuels.
The Greens point out that the conservative Christian Democrats voted against 14 of 16 new "green laws." The free-market Free Democrats the conservatives' likely coalition partner should they defeat the incumbents opposed all 16 bills.
But since the floods, all of Germany's parties are rushing to jump on the ecological bandwagon. The Christian Democrats even seem to be backtracking on their pledge to rescind the until- recently-unpopular ecological tax.
Page: 1 | 2 
