ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, when some Green parties gained their first parliamentary seats, they were very much perceived as ‘unconventional’ parties. In 1981, the first Belgian Green Members of Parliament (MPs) from Ecolo and Agalev arrived at the Parliament building on bicycles, some of them wearing long beards and rough wool sweaters. Two years later, the first German Grünen federal MPs walked in procession through the streets of Bonn to the Bundestag, carrying a dead tree in protest against the ‘productivist society’. They then regularly used the federal parliament as an arena to voice protest and presented themselves as ‘loudspeakers’ for various radical new social movements and as an ‘antiparty party’. They had no party president, rather a rotating group of ‘spokespersons’.
