The Greens saved Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Sunday’s general election and they did it by focusing on their biggest asset — Joschka Fischer, Germany’s most popular politician.
Fischer proved himself a political stayer, applying his tenacity on the running track to a gruelling 120-stop 17 000-kilometre campaign tour as the symbol of the Greens.
But true to diplomatic talents he has honed as Germany’s foreign minister, Fischer took the accolades but did not strut when he faced supporters on Sunday night.
”All this has been possible because we ran our campaign together,” he told a crowd of some 3 000 party faithful in Berlin.
With his elderly, Mr Beanish looks, Fischer is a witty, charismatic man with a knack of symbolising the Zeitgeist. He has travelled far from his left-wing revolutionary origins to the foreign office.
It is in many ways thanks to his personality that the Greens, once seen as little more than a flower-waving anti-nuclear group, gradually assumed a key role in German politics and became junior government coalition partner.
They were rewarded in 1998 with their first taste of power, which both Fischer and his party show no sign of wanting to give up.
And this is the man who stood up in the German parliament one day and said: ”With respect, Mr Speaker, you are an asshole.”
Born to a butcher of Hungarian origin, Joseph Martin Fischer dropped out of school and at 19 eloped to marry his first wife. At 54 years of age, he is now on his fourth.
He became involved in left-wing groups in the 1960s and 1970s while doing casual jobs. Earlier this year an old photograph emerged of him beating up a police officer during a demonstration. But he eschewed the violence of that scene and joined a burgeoning ecology movement that grew into the Greens.
In 1983 he entered the German parliament for the first time and in 1985 was the first Green to take up a government post, briefly appointed environment minister in the state of Hessen.
Fischer built up a reputation on the ‘realo’ or realist wing of the party, which slowly gained the upper hand over the fundamentalist ‘fundis’.
Their reward was a 6,7% score in the 1998 election and seats round the cabinet table — a benchmark they surpassed this time with a record 8,6% of the vote.
Once again Fischer stood the Greens party on its head, facing down the pacifists to agree to German airmen taking part in the 1999 Nato-led war over Kosovo.
At one point he was hit by a bag of red paint thrown by an angry opponent but he won the day, insisting that pacifism had to be discarded in the face of possible genocide.
”I was like you… until the Srebrenica massacre”, he told his opponents of the atrocity committed during the Bosnian war.
Similarly, the Greens last year endorsed the deployment of German troops to Afghanistan.
”In Fischer, Germany has become reconciled with itself ? the former rebels with the system, the system with the old rebels,” according to his biographers Matthias Geis and Bernd Ulrich.
On foreign affairs, Fischer has won plaudits for his efforts in the Middle East peace process and for advancing Germany’s role on the world stage.
He has also stirred things up, notably with a suggestion for a US-style federal Europe.
Physically Fischer has changed over the years too. The jeans and T-shirts have been replaced by suits and ties and he jogs regularly, after deciding a few years ago that he was badly overweight. – Sapa-AFP