Party membership given up - exit from political group
That’s all that changes.
After more than two years as a member of the “Greens/European Free Alliance in the European Parliament” and eight years with the German Green Party, I am leaving the party and the group. I am now an independent member of the European Parliament.
It was because of their former principles that I joined the Greens. It is obvious that the party does not stand for those fundamental principles any more. Actually, this should be sufficient as an explanation for my resignation. I would rather expect an explanation from those who stay in the party, who even campaign for it, and still call themselves left-wing, to explain their reasons. Nevertheless, I will summarise in this edition the criticism of the Greens that I have uttered during the last few years.
There still exists a wide-spread prejudice saying that the Greens were not improving anything - which even green bodies sometimes concede - but that they were not exacerbating anything either. This assumption is false, because the Greens have systematically been breaking taboos in all important areas of politics that all future governments may or will have to build on: military assaults by German soldiers have become part of the standard repertoire of German politics as well as the German-led European forces, entry permits for migrants that are allocated according to their capitalist exploitability, and a so-called nuclear consensus that will severely limit the room for manoeuvre of future governments that might possibly go for a withdrawal from nuclear energy. Thus, the red-green government has implemented the dream programme of all Christian Democrats, who are now facing an extremely difficult election campaign. To set off against the the governing coalition, their programme will have to be even more belligerent, more friendly to the industry, more hostile to social standards, fundamental rights and non-Germans than the realpolitik of the governing coalition already is. And they will have to implement that programme in the case of victory.
My political standpoint will not be affected at all by my leaving the group, nor my outlook on the development of the Greens. Even in the future, I will meet the principles of the current party platform to a much higher degree than those MEPs who are still enlisted in the party’s membership file. Political adversaries have a long time ago realised that my criticism from within and my attempts to unmask have harmed the party’s informal programme a lot more than would have been possible had I left the party earlier. This is one of the reasons which will make champagne corks pop like machine guns today in the Berlin party headquarter as well as in the Green Group’s Bureau in Brussels. Unfortunately, I have not only harmed the Greens. My activities have deluded the public into believing in the existence of a certain degree of pluralism within the Greens, which had positive effects on the image of the Greens. In reality, that pluralism has long ago ceased to exist, and the party leadership has been fighting it for quite some time now with a party regulations suit against myself.
On November 9th, 2000, the party’s Federal Executive decided to charge me before the Berlin party court of arbitration. Their justification: Supposedly I would not “obey the party regulations without a party regulations suit”.
I handed in an extensive reply (https://www.ilka.org/ordnung) and the court in charge suggested various dates for a hearing. However, the Federal Party Executive no longer seemed to have any interest. Due to continuous “schedule problems” on the part of the Executive, no hearing has ever taken place. Nor has the Executive followed a request from the court to justify their charge. There is a reason for that: neither the Federal Chairpersons Roth and Kuhn and their secretary Bütikofer nor their predecessors Radcke and Künast were able to deliver a single political argument for their suit and against my matter-of-fact, political and polemic criticism, which has always overtly and bluntly named the ones in charge - persons, parties and governments.
Ilka Schröder
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