Balancing act for Germany's Greens

In Germany, the talks about the first coalition between Greens and Social Democrats are nearing conclusion. The green prime minister designate of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, wants fewer cars to be built in future but the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung doubts he will succeed with this goal: "Anyone who believes that bicycles are enough should bear in mind that building a bicycle creates fewer jobs than building a car, that you can only do a twentieth or a fortieth of what you can do with a car with a bike, but that the world's population is not twenty or forty times as large as the number of potential car owners. If the common bicycle was the key to prosperity for all, Mao's People's Republic of China would have been the economic miracle par excellence. ... It may be painful for Kretschmann to realise that his success depends on his being as close as possible to a social democratic head of government or even his Christian Democratic predecessor when it comes to industrial policy."

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