'Danny the Red' is back, stirs things up in France

PARIS -- Thirty years after France expelled him for leading the May '68 student revolt, "Danny the Red" is back -- and stirring up French politics with a vengeance.

Hardly a day has gone by in recent months without Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the brash Green party politician, appearing at a rally, on a TV talk show or a magazine cover to promote his ideas, his party -- or just himself.

With a reputation as an incorrigible provocateur, whatever he says, what he wears, even what he eats seems to make news.

"It's revenge against the country that excluded him," said Laurent Lemire, author of a biography of Cohn-Bendit.

A leading member of Germany's Greens, Cohn-Bendit was chosen by France's Greens to top their candidate list for the June election of European Parliament members.

High on his agenda is giving residency permits to all illegal immigrants, shutting down nuclear power plants, legalizing marijuana, requiring parental leave for men and legalizing euthanasia.

Armed with those ideas and more, Cohn-Bendit, who got his nickname for the unruly red hair that he still has at age 53, has been on a whirlwind ever since being selected as a candidate in October.

Cohn-Bendit lashes with equal fury at both Socialists and Communists as well as conservative forces, although some people in his adopted party fear his recent slippage in opinion polls may be a sign he launched the campaign too soon.

The Greens have set 8 percent as their target for the European parliamentary elections, which would be up from 2.9 percent in the last vote and more than the 7 percent Communists received.

That could unsettle Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's governing coalition, in which the Communists hold three Cabinet jobs and the Greens just one.

Conservative politicians appear delighted by the trouble this environmentalist tornado is sowing on the left.

"Cohn-Bendit could become for the left what (far-right leader Jean-Marie) Le Pen is for us: poison," Nicolas Sarkozy, a leader of President Jacques Chirac's party, was quoted as saying.

Cohn-Bendit's dizzying ubiquity and ability to rile people is giving Frenchmen old enough to remember the turmoil of May 1968 deja vu.

During the heady days of the '68 protests that rocked France, it seemed Cohn-Bendit was everywhere. The unshaven sociology student with the quick tongue and sharp wit became so famous that the weekly Nouvel Obersavateur sent literary icon Jean-Paul Sartre, then 63, to interview the 23-year-old revolutionary.

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