The Greens as the Parliamentary Tribune of Protest Politics

Abstract

The acid test of any truly democratic legitimation of protest movements, however large their following, is their ability to achieve representation of their interests in parliament. Prior to the 1980s none of the movements discussed in this study ever found a home within a parliamentary party. True, their vocabulary was sometimes borrowed by established politicians and, as in the case of the SPD, certain of the protesters’ demands were, after much pressure from the party rank and file, temporarily taken on board without, however, obviating the need for extra-parliamentary protest as such. It is, in any case, highly questionable whether the vibrancy of this form of political debate can be preserved purely within the institutions of representative democracy, but without the legitimatory context of parliament the protesting voice is ultimately relegated to powerlessness. The appearance and marshalling of demonstrating multitudes within a democratic system itself begs the question why social and political change should be attempted by extra-parliamentary means when all that is apparently required is a great number of votes. The difficulty is that the concerns of protest, however worthy and widely supported, are almost by definition too ‘extreme’ to be incorporated comfortably into the traditional profile of a broadly based Volkspartei but, at the same time, tend to be narrowly focused and too diverse to translate easily into the formation of a new political party.