West Germany: The Greens See Red

Inside Hamburg's ultramodern Congress Center, delegates to the seventh conference of the Greens, West Germany's amalgam of antinuclear protesters, peace demonstrators and environmentalists, largely ignored one of the many slogans on the banners: WE GREENS MUST STICK TOGETHER. So far apart were the party's two factions—the fundamentalists, who remain faithful to the party's nonpolitical roots, and the realists, who want to have an impact on national policy—that the conference nearly split the party. At issue: whether to forge a coalition with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party.

A so-called red-green alliance could, if current voter support holds, replace the center-right government...