Cohn-Bendit, Daniel (1945- )

German student activist and politician. His 22nd March Movement was prominent amongst the leftist movements that took part in the students' and workers' demonstrations in France in May 1968. Expelled from France on the orders of the interior minister, Cohn-Bendit re-emerged in the 1980s as a prominent activist in the German Green Party, running an alternative bookshop in Frankfurt. In 1998 he was invited to head the French Green Party list for the European elections in June 1999.

Of German nationality, although born in France, Cohn-Bendit was, in 1968, a sociology student at Nanterre. Sharply critical of the French Communist Party (PCF) as a visionless bureaucracy, he was the target of a xenophobic personal attack in its daily paper, L'Humanité. This rebounded on the PCF, with street demonstrations chanting ‘We are all German Jews’. Cohn-Bendit authored Links radicalismus - Gewalter gegen die Krankheit des Communismus/Obsolete Communism - the Left-Wing Alternative (1968).