Bundestag bid falls short

BERLIN -- A Newton North graduate who was bidding for a German parliament seat will not be among his party's list of candidates for public office.

Marek Dutschke, 25, received about 100 of 800 possible votes by Green Party members at a Sunday event in Berlin to rank party candidates for the Bundestag. That was not enough votes to put him near the top of the list.

Dutschke, who graduated from high school in 1999 and the University of Massachusetts in 2003, was the subject of nationwide media attention in Germany. His father, Rudi Dutschke, was a renowned 1960s student leader whom many credit with helping shape Germany's post-World War II democracy.

The younger Dutschke said he plans to continue with the Green Party despite the outcome.

''It was a positive experience. I kept it honest," he said. ''I got 100 votes; that's a respectable score."

Dutschke ran on a platform calling for generation change in the Greens, a stance that brought him some criticism that he was skating off his father's name, and was too inexperienced and naive to hold office.

''Sometimes it helps when one's father has a name that many people know. It also helps when one gradually makes a name for oneself that lets people forget your father's. Marek Dutschke has not reached this stage," Berlin's Tagesspiegel daily commented.

But, the liberal taz daily of Berlin went against the grain, saying ''Only he can save the Greens from total old age." The number of Green Party members from Berlin to enter the Bundestag, the German version of Congress, depends on how the party does proportionally in elections in September.

Dutschke, who was born in Denmark and lived several years in Hamburg as a child and young teen, grew up largely in the Boston area with his American mother. He moved to Germany two years ago on a Fulbright grant, and has held internships with the German Foreign Ministry, the Greens, and in the European Union parliament in Brussels. His father died shortly before he was born, from injuries sustained in an assassination attempt 11 years before.