ABSTRACT
The Greens have represented a challenge in more than the sense of depriving the major parties of votes; they were launched as an "antiparty" party rejecting many elements of the postwar consensus of West German elites about the ends and means of politics. Many observers maintained that the Green party would disintegrate well before the 1987 federal election; however, the Greens were returned a second time to the Bundestag with significantly more parliamentary seats. The concept or Basisdemokratie was advanced to differentiate the Greens' organizational thrust toward participatory democracy from that of the established parties, which were perceived as bureaucratic oligarchies. The Greens have never been the one issue party which early critics discounted them as; they have had policy stands on a wide range of domestic and foreign issues since 1980. The Greens have produced numerous, often lengthly, programmatic documents at the Land and federal levels.
