Profile of the leaders of Parliament's political groups

Co-Chair Rebecca Harms (53) has led the German Green list for the European Parliament both in the 2004 and 2009 elections.

While she worked as an MEP’s assistant in the 1980s, the trained landscape gardener is known in Germany especially for her involvement in the anti-nuclear power movement and civil disobedience against a planned deposit site for nuclear waste in her native state of Lower Saxony.

Accordingly, much of her work in the European Parliament has also focussed on energy policy.

Co-Chair Daniel Cohn-Bendit (64), son of a German father and a French mother, he came to be known in both countries through his role in the 1968 student protests in Paris. Not having French nationality he was forced to leave France in the autumn of 1968.

In West Germany he became also an influential figure of the left and a friend of one-time German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. He joined the Green party in 1984 and has been an MEP continuously since 1994, being elected alternately in both France and Germany.