If Bundestag elections were held on Sunday, Germany would most likely have a new left-wing SPD-Green coalition government headed – for the first-time ever – by an ecologist chancellor. Current opinion polls put the Greens at a stunning 24 percent of the vote, slightly ahead of the SPD who gain 23 percent, and certainly enough for both to gain an absolute majority of seats in the Bundestag. In Germany, the biggest party in a coalition government traditionally gets the top jobs, the country’s chancellor or the minister-president of one of the 16 different Laender states.

One would be hard pressed to describe the recent meteoric political rise of the Greens and their corresponding transformation into Germany’s foremost opposition party as anything but revolutionary. At the last Bundestag elections in September 2009, the Greens received just 10 percent of the votes and were forced to stay in opposition while Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU conservatives managed to force out the SPD from their four-year old “Grand Coalition” to form the current center-right government with the free-market FDP party.