On coopoeration of Polish and German Greens and our actions

Co –working with German Greens is a pleasure. We have a common mailing list created for Polish and German Greens from the border area. In the past we made a successful bike tour around the Odra river estuary and another one in the Odra Valley near Berlin, just on the Polish- German border.

During the second bike tour we protested against the lack of bridges and ferries across the Oder. There are remnants of former bridges, there is even a kind of a half-bridge that is a remnant of a previous bridge that existed in Eisenhuettenstadt before the second world war. I myself attended the gymnasium in Neuzelle near Eisenhuettenstadt and in order to get to the other side of the river one needs to travel at least 50 kilometers to the nearest bridge.

Before the second world war there was at least twice as many bridges and multiple river ferries. There were tramway lines tat crossed the current border in 5 towns on the border. Currently only in one town one can use urban public transport to cross the border. Often between the towns you have only vintage tramway tracks, as in Gubin/Guben. Railway connections are scarce. Most of public transport across the border was stopped when state-owned railway monopoly in Poland withdrew its services on the Polish side. Currently only one line, that is served by private operator (in Kostrzyn-Kuestrin) provides services every 60 minutes, the rest is operated by the state-owned monopoly and provides remnant services (for example 3 times daily) with devastatingly poor patronage.

Bus connections do not exist because of some bureaucratic barriers except for one case (Goerlitz/ Zgorzelec). We as Greens are working to change it. We have organized already several demonstrations, one during the last Green Summer University in Frankfurt Oder/ Slubice. I hope that in future we will have more media coverage. Especially on the Polish side press largerly dislikes us and I created a successful blog to get across to the readers. On the Polish side the situation looks rather bad, as most young people are emigration from the poverty zone that stretches along German border. So the future looks rather hopeless.