Last month, Germany’s Greens nominated a candidate for chancellor for the first time in the party’s thirty-one-year history. The Green Party has long been a vocal but minor force in German politics — rarely scoring over 10 percent support in national contests. But with the advent of climate justice movements like Fridays for Future and the party’s rising presence in regional government, it is now polling above 25 percent, creating a realistic prospect for its cochairwoman Annalena Baerbock to become chancellor after September’s federal election. As both the Social Democrats and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) continue their downward spiral, it has become hard to imagine a national government without any Green participation.

Media reports have been eager to point out that Baerbock’s party is very different from the Greens of old — a composite force that scraped together various currents of the antinuclear and peace movements, as well as some shattered remnants of the 1970s radical left. The modern Greens are seen as pragmatic centrists, who are comfortable with and eager for political power.

High-ranking Green politicians have striven to establish the party’s image as a pragmatic liberal force: unapologetically pro-European, progressive on issues such as women’s and minority rights, and moderate in their stance on regulating big business. As Baerbock and cochair Robert Habeck claimed in a high-profile column for German weekly Die Zeit, the Greens are the party of social movements as well as business.